Developmental changes in mismatch responses to mandarin consonants and lexical tones from early to middle childhood.

Huei-Mei Liu,Yuchun Chen,Feng-Ming Tsao,Joel Snyder

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0095587

Huei-Mei Liu, Yuchun Chen + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0095587

Copy DOI

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to use mismatch responses (MMRs) to explore the dynamic changes of Mandarin speech perception abilities from early to middle childhood. Twenty preschoolers, 18 school-aged children, and 26 adults participated in this study. Two sets of synthesized speech stimuli varying in Mandarin consonant (alveolo-palatal affricate vs. fricative) and lexical tone features (rising vs. contour tone) were used to examine the developmental course of speech perception abilities. The results indicated that only the adult group demonstrated typical early mismatch negativity (MMN) responses, suggesting that the ability to discriminate specific speech cues in Mandarin consonant and lexical tone is a continuing process in preschool- and school-aged children. Additionally, distinct MMR patterns provided evidence indicating diverse developmental courses to different speech characteristics. By incorporating data from the two speech conditions, we propose using MMR profiles consisting of mismatch negativity (MMN), positive mismatch response (p-MMR), and late discriminative negativity (LDN) as possible brain indices to investigate speech perception development.

Highlights

Studying speech perception in childhood can improve the understanding of how humans learn to process speech sounds and how people become culture-bounded and attend to the specific sounds in their native languages
The results indicated that, for the compulsory elements of Mandarin syllables, the larger deviants elicited adult-like mismatch negativity (MMN) and the smaller deviants elicited positive mismatch response (p-MMR)
The main purpose of our study was using MMRs to explore the dynamic changes in Mandarin speech perception from early to middle childhood

Summary

Introduction

Studying speech perception in childhood can improve the understanding of how humans learn to process speech sounds and how people become culture-bounded and attend to the specific sounds in their native languages. The difference in the speechrelated perception abilities in infants may predict their language performances in the early childhood [2,3,4]. Because children are continually exposed to their native languages, perception is expected to be refined and altered before they reach a stable adult-like status. Some studies have suggested that the speech categorization, discrimination, and recognition abilities in preschool and school-aged children are not as mature as those of adults [5,6,7,8]. Children have been found to be incapable of using the fine-grained spectral cues under adult-directed speech as well as adults do in discrimination and identification tasks [9,10]

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion