Phonological Mismatch Negativity Research Articles

Can You Hear What's Coming? Failure to Replicate ERP Evidence for Phonological Prediction.

Prediction-based theories of language comprehension assume that listeners predict both the meaning and phonological form of likely upcoming words. In alleged event-related potential (ERP) demonstrations of phonological prediction, prediction-mismatching words elicit a phonological mismatch negativity (PMN), a frontocentral negativity that precedes the centroparietal N400 component. However, classification and replicability of the PMN has proven controversial, with ongoing debate on whether the PMN is a distinct component or merely an early part of the N400. In this electroencephalography (EEG) study, we therefore attempted to replicate the PMN effect and its separability from the N400, using a participant sample size (N = 48) that was more than double that of previous studies. Participants listened to sentences containing either a predictable word or an unpredictable word with/without phonological overlap with the predictable word. Preregistered analyses revealed a widely distributed negative-going ERP in response to unpredictable words in both the early (150-250 ms) and the N400 (300-500 ms) time windows. Bayes factor analysis yielded moderate evidence against a different scalp distribution of the effects in the two time windows. Although our findings do not speak against phonological prediction during sentence comprehension, they do speak against the PMN effect specifically as a marker of phonological prediction mismatch. Instead of an PMN effect, our results demonstrate the early onset of the auditory N400 effect associated with unpredictable words. Our failure to replicate further highlights the risk associated with commonly employed data-contingent analyses (e.g., analyses involving time windows or electrodes that were selected based on visual inspection) and small sample sizes in the cognitive neuroscience of language.

When A Nonnative Accent Lets You Spot All the Errors: Examining the Syntactic Interlanguage Benefit.

In our continuously globalizing world, cross-cultural and cross-linguistic communications are far from exceptional. A wealth of research has indicated that the processing of nonnative-accented speech can be challenging for native listeners, both at the level of phonology. However, few online studies have examined the underpinnings of accented speech recognition from the perspective of the nonnative listener, even though behavioral studies indicate that accented input may be easier to process for such individuals (i.e., the interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit. The current EEG study first examined the phonological and syntactic analysis of nonnative-accented speech among nonnative listeners. As such, 30 English learners of Spanish listened to syntactically correct and incorrect Spanish sentences produced in native and nonnative-accented Spanish. The violation in the incorrect sentences was caused by errors that are typical (i.e., gender errors; *la color) or atypical (i.e., number errors; *los color) for English learners of Spanish. Results indicated that nonnative listeners elicit a phonological mismatch negativity (PMN) when attending to speech produced by a native Spanish speaker. Furthermore, the nonnative listeners showed a P600 for all grammatical violations, indicating that they repair all errors regardless of their typicality or the accent in which they are produced. Follow-up analyses compared our novel data to the data of native listeners from the methodologically identical precursor study. These analyses showed that native and nonnative listeners exhibit directionally opposite PMN effects; whereas natives exhibited a larger PMN for English-accented Spanish, nonnatives displayed a larger PMN in response to native Spanish utterances (a classic interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit). An additional difference was observed at the syntactic level: Whereas natives repaired only atypical number errors when they were English-accented, nonnative participants exhibited a P600 in response to all English-accented syntactic errors, regardless of their typicality (a syntactic interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit). Altogether, these results suggest that accented speech is not inherently difficult to process; in fact, nonnatives may benefit from the presence of a nonnative accent. Thus, our data provide some of the first electrophysiological evidence supporting the existence of the classic interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit and its novel syntactic counterpart.

Early Auditory Event-Related Potentials Are Modulated by Alphabetic Literacy Skills in Logographic Chinese Readers.

The acquisition of an alphabetic orthography transforms speech processing in the human brain. Behavioral evidence shows that phonological awareness as assessed by meta-phonological tasks like phoneme judgment, is enhanced by alphabetic literacy acquisition. The current study investigates the time-course of the neuro-cognitive operations underlying this enhancement as revealed by event-related potentials (ERPs). Chinese readers with and without proficiency in Jyutping, a Romanization system of Cantonese, were recruited for an auditory onset phoneme judgment task; their behavioral responses and the elicited ERPs were examined. Proficient readers of Jyutping achieved higher response accuracy and exhibited more negative-going ERPs in three early ERP time-windows corresponding to the P1, N1, and P2 components. The phonological mismatch negativity component exhibited sensitivity to both onset and rhyme mismatch in the speech stimuli, but it was not modulated by alphabetic literacy skills. The sustained negativity in the P1-N1-P2 time-windows is interpreted as reflecting enhanced phonetic/phonological processing or attentional/awareness modulation associated with alphabetic literacy and phonological awareness skills.

Neuroplasticity in the phonological system: The PMN and the N400 as markers for the perception of non-native phonemic contrasts by late second language learners

Second language (L2) learners frequently encounter persistent difficulty in perceiving certain non-native sound contrasts, i.e., a phenomenon called “phonological deafness”. However, if extensive L2 experience leads to neuroplastic changes in the phonological system, then the capacity to discriminate non-native phonemic contrasts should progressively improve. Such perceptual changes should be attested by modifications at the neurophysiological level. We designed an EEG experiment in which the listeners’ perceptual capacities to discriminate second language phonemic contrasts influence the processing of lexical-semantic violations. Semantic congruency of critical words in a sentence context was driven by a phonemic contrast that was unique to the L2, English (e.g.,/ɪ/-/i:/, ship – sheep). Twenty-eight young adult native speakers of French with intermediate proficiency in English listened to sentences that contained either a semantically congruent or incongruent critical word (e.g., The anchor of theship/*sheepwas let down) while EEG was recorded. Three ERP effects were found to relate to increasing L2 proficiency: (1) a left frontal auditory N100 effect, (2) a smaller fronto-central phonological mismatch negativity (PMN) effect and (3) a semantic N400 effect. No effect of proficiency was found on oscillatory markers. The current findings suggest that neuronal plasticity in the human brain allows for the late acquisition of even hard-wired linguistic features such as the discrimination of phonemic contrasts in a second language. This is the first time that behavioral and neurophysiological evidence for the critical role of neural plasticity underlying L2 phonological processing and its interdependence with semantic processing has been provided. Our data strongly support the idea that pieces of information from different levels of linguistic processing (e.g., phonological, semantic) strongly interact and influence each other during online language processing.

The phonological Mismatch Negativity and P300 as diagnostic tools in stroke-related aphasia recovery: a longitudinal multiple case study

ABSTRACT Background Recovery from stroke-related aphasia follows different stages, evolving from the acute and subacute phase (< 6 months post stroke) into the chronic phase (> 6 months post stroke). In general, phonology remains tenaciously disturbed, making it a relevant language marker to assess in every stage of recovery. The classical behavioural evaluation of phonological abilities in patients with aphasia can be extended with a registration of event-related potentials (ERPs), for example, the Mismatch Negativity (MMN) and the P300. ERPs have been suggested (1) to contain indications towards the language recovery progress (Nolfe et al. 2006. The role of P300 in the recovery of post-stroke global aphasia. European Journal of Neurology, 13(4), 377–384. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-1331.2006.01237.x) and (2) to provide additional and (more) sensitive information along with the behavioural results (Aerts, Batens et al. 2015. Aphasia therapy early after stroke: Behavioural and neurophysiological changes in the acute and post-acute phases. Aphasiology, 29(7), 845–871. https://doi.org/10.1080/02687038.2014.996520). In this longitudinal study, we aimed to corroborate these previous findings. Methods and procedures In four patients with aphasia after a first-ever stroke, we administered behavioural language tasks as well as phonological ERPs in the (sub)acute and in the chronic stage of recovery. Outcomes and results The results demonstrate that the early presence of a P300 could be considered as an indicator of better recovery of language comprehension over time. For the MMN, such an indicative value remains to be confirmed. Moreover, abnormal ERP amplitudes or latencies accompanied behavioural ceiling effects in the chronic stage, suggesting a sensitivity of phonological ERPs for subtle language deficits that could not be detected by the established behavioural instruments. Conclusions The added values of phonological ERPs advocate their implementation in aphasia rehabilitation.

Language Outcomes in Adults with a History of Institutionalization: Behavioral and Neurophysiological Characterization

Impoverished early care environments are associated with developmental deficits in children raised in institutional settings. Despite the accumulation of evidence regarding deficits in general cognitive functioning in this population, less is known about the impact of institutionalization on language development at the level of brain and behavior. We examined language outcomes in young adults and adolescents raised in institutions (n = 23) as compared to their socioeconomic status and age peers raised in biological families (n = 24) using a behavioral language assessment and linguistic event-related potentials (ERPs). Controlling for intelligence, adults with a history of institutionalization demonstrated deficits in lexical and grammatical development and spelling. Analyses of ERP data revealed significant group differences in the dynamic processing of linguistic stimuli. Adults with a history of institutionalization displayed reduced neural sensitivity to violations of word expectancy, leading to reduced condition effects for temporo-spatial factors that tentatively corresponded to the N200, P300/N400, and phonological mismatch negativity. The results suggest that language is a vulnerable domain in adults with a history of institutionalization, the deficits in which are not explained by general developmental delays, and point to the pivotal role of early linguistic environment in the development of the neural networks involved in language processing.

Pointing to the right side? An ERP study on anaphora resolution in German Sign Language.

Sign languages use the horizontal plane to refer to discourse referents introduced at referential locations. However, the question remains whether the assignment of discourse referents follows a particular default pattern as recently proposed such that two new discourse referents are respectively assigned to the right (ipsilateral) and left (contralateral) side of (right handed) signers. The present event-related potential study on German Sign Language investigates the hypothesis that signers assign distinct and contrastive referential locations to discourse referents even in the absence of overt localization. By using a semantic mismatch-design, we constructed sentence sets where the second sentence was either consistent or inconsistent with the used pronoun. Semantic mismatch conditions evoked an N400, whereas a contralateral index sign engendered a Phonological Mismatch Negativity. The current study provides supporting evidence that signers are sensitive to the mismatch and make use of a default pattern to assign distinct and contrastive referential locations to discourse referents.

Electrophysiological Indexes of Incongruent Audiovisual Phonemic Processing: Unraveling the McGurk Effect

In this study the timing of electromagnetic signals recorded during incongruent and congruent audiovisual (AV) stimulation in 14 Italian healthy volunteers was examined. In a previous study (Proverbio et al., 2016) we investigated the McGurk effect in the Italian language and found out which visual and auditory inputs provided the most compelling illusory effects (e.g., bilabial phonemes presented acoustically and paired with non-labials, especially alveolar–nasal and velar–occlusive phonemes). In this study EEG was recorded from 128 scalp sites while participants observed a female and a male actor uttering 288 syllables selected on the basis of the previous investigation (lasting approximately 600 ms) and responded to rare targets (/re/, /ri/, /ro/, /ru/). In half of the cases the AV information was incongruent, except for targets that were always congruent. A pMMN (phonological Mismatch Negativity) to incongruent AV stimuli was identified 500 ms after voice onset time. This automatic response indexed the detection of an incongruity between the labial and phonetic information. SwLORETA (Low-Resolution Electromagnetic Tomography) analysis applied to the difference voltage incongruent–congruent in the same time window revealed that the strongest sources of this activity were the right superior temporal (STG) and superior frontal gyri, which supports their involvement in AV integration.

ERPs Reveal the Time-Course of Aberrant Visual-Phonological Binding in Developmental Dyslexia.

New evidence is accumulating for a deficit in binding visual-orthographic information with the corresponding phonological code in developmental dyslexia. Here, we identify the mechanisms underpinning this deficit using event-related brain potentials (ERPs) in dyslexic and control adult readers performing a letter-matching task. In each trial, a printed letter was presented synchronously with an auditory letter name. Incongruent (mismatched), frequent trials were interleaved with congruent (matched) infrequent target pairs, which participants were asked to report by pressing a button. In critical trials, incongruent letter pairs were mismatched but confusable in terms of their visual or phonological features. Typical readers showed early detection of deviant trials, indicated by larger modulation in the range of the phonological mismatch negativity (PMN) compared with standard trials. This was followed by stronger modulation of the P3b wave for visually confusable deviants and an increased lateralized readiness potential (LRP) for phonological deviants, compared with standards. In contrast, dyslexic readers showed reduced sensitivity to deviancy in the PMN range. Responses to deviants in the P3b range indicated normal letter recognition processes, but the LRP calculation revealed a specific impairment for visual-orthographic information during response selection in dyslexia. In a follow-up experiment using an analogous non-lexical task in the same participants, we found no reading-group differences, indicating a degree of specificity to over-learnt visual-phonological binding. Our findings indicate early insensitivity to visual-phonological binding in developmental dyslexia, coupled with difficulty selecting the correct orthographic code.

Impaired speech perception leads to poor semantic access: ERP evidence from individuals with pathologically or artificially impaired speech perception.

Impaired speech perception leads to poor semantic access: ERP evidence from individuals with pathologically or artificially impaired speech perception.

“All that glitters is not … alone”. Congruity effects in highly and less predictable sentence contexts

Using natural connected speech, the aim of the present study was to examine the semantic congruity effect (i.e. the difference between semantically incongruous and congruous words) in sentence contexts that generate high or moderate final word expectancies. We used sentences with two levels of word expectancy in the auditory modality: familiar proverbs (that generate high final word expectancy), and unfamiliar sentences (that generate only moderate final word expectancy). Results revealed an early congruity effect (0-200 ms) that developed across all scalp sites for familiar proverbs but not for unfamiliar sentences. By contrast, typical centro-parietal N400 and Late Positivity Component congruity effects developed later (200-500 ms and 600-900 ms ranges) for both familiar proverbs and unfamiliar sentences. We argue that the early congruity effect for proverbs comprises both a Phonological Mismatch Negativity, reflecting the processing of the acoustic/phonological mismatch between the expected (congruous) and unexpected (incongruous) sentence completions and a typical N400 semantic congruity effect with an unusual short latency because final words can be predicted from the unusually high contextual constraints of familiar proverbs. These results are considered in the light of current views of anticipation and prediction processes in sentence contexts.

The acceleration of spoken-word processing in children's native-language acquisition: An ERP cohort study

Healthy adults can identify spoken words at a remarkable speed, by incrementally analyzing word-onset information. It is currently unknown how this adult-level speed of spoken-word processing emerges during children's native-language acquisition. In a picture–word mismatch paradigm, we manipulated the semantic congruency between picture contexts and spoken words, and recorded event-related potential (ERP) responses to the words. Previous similar studies focused on the N400 response, but we focused instead on the onsets of semantic congruency effects (N200 or Phonological Mismatch Negativity), which contain critical information for incremental spoken-word processing. We analyzed ERPs obtained longitudinally from two age cohorts of 40 primary-school children (total n=80) in a 3-year period. Children first tested at 7 years of age showed earlier onsets of congruency effects (by approximately 70ms) when tested 2 years later (i.e., at age 9). Children first tested at 9 years of age did not show such shortening of onset latencies 2 years later (i.e., at age 11). Overall, children's onset latencies at age 9 appeared similar to those of adults. These data challenge the previous hypothesis that word processing is well established at age 7. Instead they support the view that the acceleration of spoken-word processing continues beyond age 7.

Listening to the sound of silence: disfluent silent pauses in speech have consequences for listeners

Silent pauses are a common form of disfluency in speech yet little attention has been paid to them in the psycholinguistic literature. The present paper investigates the consequences of such silences for listeners, using an Event-Related Potential (ERP) paradigm. Participants heard utterances ending in predictable or unpredictable words, some of which included a disfluent silence before the target. In common with previous findings using er disfluencies, the N400 difference between predictable and unpredictable words was attenuated for the utterances that included silent pauses, suggesting a reduction in the relative processing benefit for predictable words. An earlier relative negativity, topographically distinct from the N400 effect and identifiable as a Phonological Mismatch Negativity (PMN), was found for fluent utterances only. This suggests that only in the fluent condition did participants perceive the phonology of unpredictable words to mismatch with their expectations. By contrast, for disfluent utterances only, unpredictable words gave rise to a late left frontal positivity, an effect previously observed following ers and disfluent repetitions. We suggest that this effect reflects the engagement of working memory processes that occurs when fluent speech is resumed. Using a surprise recognition memory test, we also show that listeners were more likely to recognise words which had been encountered after silent pauses, demonstrating that silence affects not only the process of language comprehension but also its eventual outcome. We argue that, from a listener's perspective, one critical feature of disfluency is the temporal delay which it adds to the speech signal.

Investigating the time course of spoken word recognition: electrophysiological evidence for the influences of phonological similarity.

Behavioral and modeling evidence suggests that words compete for recognition during auditory word identification, and that phonological similarity is a driving factor in this competition. The present study used event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine the temporal dynamics of different types of phonological competition (i.e., cohort and rhyme). ERPs were recorded during a novel picture-word matching task, where a target picture was followed by an auditory word that either matched the target (CONE-cone), or mismatched in one of three ways: rhyme (CONE-bone), cohort (CONE-comb), and unrelated (CONE-fox). Rhymes and cohorts differentially modulated two distinct ERP components, the phonological mismatch negativity and the N400, revealing the influences of prelexical and lexical processing components in speech recognition. Cohort mismatches resulted in late increased negativity in the N400, reflecting disambiguation of the later point of miscue and the combined influences of top-down expectations and misleading bottom-up phonological information on processing. In contrast, we observed a reduction in the N400 for rhyme mismatches, reflecting lexical activation of rhyme competitors. Moreover, the observed rhyme effects suggest that there is an interaction between phoneme-level and lexical-level information in the recognition of spoken words. The results support the theory that both levels of information are engaged in parallel during auditory word recognition in a way that permits both bottom-up and top-down competition effects.

Activation of the posterior cingulate by semantic priming: A co-registered ERP/fMRI study

Although the N400 is the best understood semantically sensitive component of the event-related potential (ERP), others have been observed as well. In an earlier lexical decision study, an N300 ERP was found to be enhanced to unprimed targets, although the effect could also be characterized as a prolonged P2 to primed targets as described in other reports. Because its scalp topography suggested its neural source might be of interest, a source localization was conducted that suggested that this component emanated from the dorsal posterior cingulate cortex (dPCC). In order to confirm this word N300 localization, a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study was conducted to replicate the ERP study with a separate sample of 17 participants in an event-related design, using a 3-T scanner. A significant activation in the right dPCC was found corresponding to the N300 localization. The activation was greater on the related prime trials, supporting the characterization of the ERP component as being a P2 rather than an N300. A review is provided which suggests that a number of separate lines of ERP research regarding the word N300, the picture N300, the word P2, the phonological mismatch negativity, and the word midline frontal negativity may be most parsimoniously regarded as dealing with the same ERP component and that they all therefore emanate from the dPCC. It is suggested that this region plays a role in stimulus–response mapping in polymodal fashion. It is also suggested that the ERP component be termed a P2-dPCC.

ERP measures of auditory word repetition and translation priming in bilinguals

Motivated by the demonstration of similarly localized adaptation of the hemodynamic response in a first (L1) and second (L2) language, this study examined event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to spoken words in L1 and L2 in 15 English–French bilinguals. We examined whether the temporal pattern of N400 adaptation due to within-language repetitions (i.e., repetition priming) was similar in L1 and L2 and whether the release from adaptation elicited by a within-language word change was similar. Furthermore, using word changes across language, we examined the phonological mismatch negativity (PMN) and N400 components to determine the kind of information activated during translation priming. In contrast to within-language repetition, we expected between-language repetition (i.e., translations) to be characterized by conceptual rather than lexical/phonological word form priming. Overall, the pattern of adaptation and release from adaptation was similar in L1 and L2, with evidence of delayed semantic analysis in L2 in the form of a later N400 effect. A change in language (L1 to L2) elicited a similar pattern of PMN and N400 activity compared to a within-language change in meaning in L1, suggesting that neither word form nor conceptual information was available on-line for the forward translation. In contrast, the presence of strong PMN but minimal N400 effects for L2-to-L1 translations suggests that conceptual but not phonological information is available on-line for backwards translation. L2 proficiency influenced the extent to which conceptual representations were activated by translations. These data are discussed in light of current models of bilingual word processing and suggest modality differences in the pattern of activation of lexical and conceptual information.

Electrophysiological differentiation of phonological and semantic integration in word and sentence contexts

During auditory language comprehension, listeners need to rapidly extract meaning from the continuous speech-stream. It is a matter of debate when and how contextual information constrains the activation of lexical representations in meaningful contexts. Electrophysiological studies of spoken language comprehension have identified an event-related potential (ERP) that was sensitive to phonological properties of speech, which was termed the phonological mismatch negativity (PMN). With the PMN, early lexical processing could potentially be distinguished from processes of semantic integration in spoken language comprehension. However, the sensitivity of the PMN to phonological processing per se has been questioned, and it has additionally been suggested that the “PMN” is not separable from the N400, an ERP that is sensitive to semantic aspects of the input. Here, we investigated whether or not a separable PMN exists and if it reflects purely phonological aspects of the speech input. In the present experiment, ERPs were recorded from healthy young adults ( N = 24) while they listened to sentences and word lists, in which we manipulated semantic and phonological expectation and congruency of the final word. ERPs sensitive to phonological processing were elicited only when phonological expectancy was violated in lists of words, but not during normal sentential processing. This suggests a differential role of phonological processing in more or less meaningful contexts and indicates a very early influence of the overall context on lexical processing in sentences.

Activation in the anterior left auditory cortex associated with phonological analysis of speech input: localization of the phonological mismatch negativity response with MEG

The spatio-temporal dynamics of cortical activation underlying auditory word recognition, particularly its phonological stage, was studied with whole-head magnetoencephalography (MEG). Subjects performed a visuo-auditory priming task known to evoke the phonological mismatch negativity (PMN) response that is elicited by violations of phonological expectancies. Words and non-words were presented in separate conditions. In each of the 318 trials, the subjects first saw a word/non-word (e.g., ‘cat’) that was soon followed by a prime letter (e.g., ‘h’). Their task was to replace mentally the sound of the first letter of the word/non-word with the prime letter, thus resulting in a new word/non-word (e.g., ‘hat’). Finally, an auditory word/non-word either matching or mismatching with the anticipated item was presented. In most subjects, a PMNm followed by a later, N400m-like negativity was obtained in the left hemisphere to the mismatching auditory stimuli. A similar response pattern was obtained in the right hemisphere only in a few subjects. Source localization of the N1m, an index of acoustic analysis, and the PMNm and N400m-like responses was performed using L1 minimum-norm estimation. In the left hemisphere, the PMNm source for the words was significantly more anterior than the source of the N400m-like response; for the non-words, the PMNm source was significantly more anterior than the sources of the N1m and the N400m-like response. These results suggest that the left-hemisphere neuronal networks involved in sub-lexical phonological analysis are at least partly different from those responsible for the earlier (acoustic) and later (whole item) processing of speech input.

Separating phonological and semantic processing in auditory sentence processing: a high-resolution event-related brain potential study.

Phonological and semantic processing was studied using high-resolution event-related brain potentials (ERPs) during a sentence-matching task to investigate the spatial distribution of the phonological mismatch negativity (PMN) and the N400 response. It was hypothesized that the two components were spatially separable and that the activity matched prior localization knowledge. Participants examined visual-auditory sentence pairs that related within a semantic hierarchy (e.g., visual: "The man is teaching in the classroom"; Auditory: "The man is in the em leader school/barn"). Semantic congruency was varied for the final words of the spoken sentences. Incongruent words mismatched expectation in terms of both the initial phonological features (unexpected sound) and semantic features (unexpected meaning). In addition, the category-exemplar probability of the final words was either high or low, with low probability words being more difficult to anticipate. Low probability words were predicted to selectively affect PMN activity. We found that incongruent words elicited a PMN (287 msec) and a N400 (424 msec), for both the high and low probability words. As expected, low probability congruent words elicited a small PMN but no N400. In contrast, high probability congruent words elicited neither a detectible PMN nor a N400. The primary PMN sources were in left inferior frontal and inferior parietal lobes. The primary N400 source activation occurred along the left perisylvian cortex, consistent with prior N400 source localization work. From these results, it was concluded that the PMN and N400 were localized to separate cortical language (and memory) regions and had different source activation patterns.

Phonological aspects of word recognition as revealed by high-resolution spatio-temporal brain mapping.

We describe, for the first time, the use of high-resolution event-related brain potentials (hrERP) to identify the spatio-temporal characteristics of neural systems involved in phonological analysis. Subjects studied a visual word/non-word that was followed by the brief presentation of a prime letter (e.g. House, M) with the instruction to anticipate the word/non-word formed by replacing the word's first letter with the prime letter. After the prime letter, an auditory target word/non-word was presented that either matched/mismatched expectations (e.g., Mouse/Barn). ERPs were recorded to the onset of the auditory targets and scalp topographical maps were derived for the phonological mismatch negativity (PMN). The PMN reflected phonological analysis and examination of the peak topography revealed that the response was characterized by a prominent frontal, right-asymmetrical distribution. Spatial de-blurring (using current source density maps) indicated that the PMN scalp topography resulted primarily from an active left anterior source. The current results provide the initial evidence for the localization of the intra-cranial generator(s) involved in phonological analysis.