Long-term phonological learning begins at the level of word form

A Nora, Annika Hultén, L Karvonen, JY Kim, Minna Lehtonen, H Yli-Kaitala, E Service, R Salmelin

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticleScientificpeer-review

    6 Citations (Scopus)

    Abstract

    Incidental learning of phonological structures through repeated exposure is an important component of native and foreign-language vocabulary acquisition that is not well understood at the neurophysiological level. It is also not settled when this type of learning occurs at the level of word forms as opposed to phoneme sequences. Here, participants listened to and repeated back foreign phonological forms (Korean words) and new native-language word forms (Finnish pseudowords) on two days. Recognition performance was improved, repetition latency became shorter and repetition accuracy increased when phonological forms were encountered multiple times. Cortical magnetoencephalography responses occurred bilaterally but the experimental effects only in the left hemisphere. Superior temporal activity at 300-600 ms, probably reflecting acoustic-phonetic processing, lasted longer for foreign phonology than for native phonology. Formation of longer-term auditory-motor representations was evidenced by a decrease of a spatiotemporally separate left temporal response and correlated increase of left frontal activity at 600-1200 ms on both days. The results point to item-level learning of novel whole-word representations. (C) 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
    Original languageUndefined/Unknown
    Pages (from-to)789–799
    Number of pages11
    JournalNeuroImage
    Volume63
    Issue number2
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 2012
    MoE publication typeA1 Journal article-refereed

    Keywords

    • Auditory perception
    • Language learning
    • MEG
    • Nonword repetition
    • Speech production

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