Linguistic relevance of duration within the native language detemines the accuracy of speech-sound duration processing

As indexed by electrophysiological measures, in native speakers of a language with linguistically significant opposition between short and long phonemes, the pre-attentive detection accuracy of duration changes in speech sounds was tuned in comparison with that in non-speech sounds. This was not observed in advanced second-language users of the same language, suggesting that second-language acquisition does not lead to speech-specific tuning of the duration processing as does native language acquisition in early childhood. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.