Near native-like stress pattern perception in English-French bilinguals as indexed by the mismatch negativity

Annie C Gilbert; Claire T Honda; Natalie A Phillips; Shari R Baum

doi:10.1016/j.bandl.2020.104892

Near native-like stress pattern perception in English-French bilinguals as indexed by the mismatch negativity

Brain Lang. 2021 Feb:213:104892. doi: 10.1016/j.bandl.2020.104892. Epub 2020 Dec 14.

Authors

Annie C Gilbert¹, Claire T Honda², Natalie A Phillips³, Shari R Baum⁴

Affiliations

¹ Centre for Research on Brain, Language, and Music, 3640 de la Montagne, Montreal, QC H3G 2A8, Canada; School of Communication Sciences and Disorders, McGill University, 2001 McGill College, 8th Floor, Montreal, QC H3A 1G1, Canada. Electronic address: [email protected].
² Centre for Research on Brain, Language, and Music, 3640 de la Montagne, Montreal, QC H3G 2A8, Canada; School of Communication Sciences and Disorders, McGill University, 2001 McGill College, 8th Floor, Montreal, QC H3A 1G1, Canada. Electronic address: [email protected].
³ Centre for Research on Brain, Language, and Music, 3640 de la Montagne, Montreal, QC H3G 2A8, Canada; Department of Psychology, Concordia University, 7141 Sherbrooke West, Montreal, QC H4B 1R6, Canada. Electronic address: [email protected].
⁴ Centre for Research on Brain, Language, and Music, 3640 de la Montagne, Montreal, QC H3G 2A8, Canada; School of Communication Sciences and Disorders, McGill University, 2001 McGill College, 8th Floor, Montreal, QC H3A 1G1, Canada. Electronic address: [email protected].

PMID: 33333337
DOI: 10.1016/j.bandl.2020.104892

Abstract

We examined lexical stress processing in English-French bilinguals. Auditory mismatch negativity (MMN) responses were recorded in response to English and French pseudowords, whose primary stress occurred either on a language-consistent "usual" or language-inconsistent "unusual" syllable. In most conditions, the pseudowords elicited two consecutive MMNs, and somewhat surprisingly, these MMNs were not systematically modulated by bilingual experience. This suggests that it is possible to achieve native-like pre-attentive processing of lexical stress, even in a language that one has not learned since birth.

Keywords: Bilingualism; Lexical stress; Mismatch negativity; Prosody; Speech processing.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Attention
Electroencephalography
Humans
Language*
Pitch Perception
Speech Perception*