Chen, Y. 1 , Lien, Y. 2 , Chen, Y. 2 & Lee, J. R. 2
1 Department of Special Education. National Taiwn Normal University. Taipei, Taiwan
2 Department of Educational Psychology and Counseling. National Taiwn Normal University. Taipei, Taiwan
We recorded MMN response for 22 second-graders (average age= 7y11m) to Chinese and Finnish speech sound contrasts. There were two deviants in each language which differ in perceptual difficulty based on their acoustic features. Within each language, the number of standard and the two deviants were 1013:125:125. The Chinese speech sounds were synthetic nonword syllable /fau/ with different tones, varying in their vowel fundamental frequency. In Finnish, duration is the phonemic cue we used in the experiment since sound duration alone could determine the quantity of a Finnish but not a Chinese phoneme. The /t/ in the Finnish nonword /ata/ stimuli was a voiceless stop with a silent period in the middle of the sound, and the silent period was 74 ms for the standard stimuli, 116 ms and 210 ms for the two deviants. The results showed that Chinese-speaking children demonstrated significant MMN to the property in their own native language. Their brain response pattern was similar to their adult counterparts (data from our previous study), but with a longer latency. For the Finnish speech sound condition, both children and adult showed the MMN responses within the same time window (293~433 ms). Our results showed that there is a developmental trend in the brain response of Chinese speakers to the important language property of their native language, which might be shaped by language experience. However, when these Chinese speakers encounter a non-native language property which is not salient in their own language, they might process it by the acoustic/physical feature and therefore the MMNs reflected were the same in children and adults. The relationship between these MMN responses and the reading abilities of the normal and dyslexic children are still under exploration in an on-going study.