Preattentive processing of consonant vowel syllables at the level of the supratemporal plane: a whole-head magnetencephalography study

A variety of clinical and experimental data indicate superiority of the left hemisphere with respect to the encoding of dynamic aspects of the acoustic speech signal such as formant transients, i.e., fast changes of spectral energy distribution across a few tens of milliseconds, which cue the perception of stop consonant Vowel syllables. Using an oddball design, the present study recorded auditory evoked magnetic fields by means of a whole-head device in response to vowels as well as syllable-like structures. Both the N1m component (= the magnetic equivalent to the N1 response of the electroencephalogram (EEG)) and various difference waves between the magnetic fields to standard and respective rare events (MMNm = magnetic mismatch negativity) were calculated (a) Vowel mismatch (/a/ against /e/) resulted in an enlarged Nlm amplitude reflecting, most presumably, peripheral adaptation processes. (b) As concerns lateralized responses to syllable-like structures, only the shortest transient duration (= 10 ms) elicited a significantly enhanced MMNm at the left side. Conceivably, the observed hemispheric difference contributes to prelexical parsing of the auditory signal rather than the encoding of linguistic categories. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.