Discrimination of stress in speech and music : a mismatch negativity (MMN) study

Varghese Peter, Genevieve McArthur, William Forde Thompson

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

The aim of this study was to determine if duration-related stress in speech and music is processed in a similar way in the brain. To this end, we tested 20 adults for their abstract mismatch negativity (MMN) event-related potentials to two duration-related stress patterns: stress on the first syllable or note (long-short), and stress on the second syllable or note (short-long). A significant MMN was elicited for both speech and music except for the short-long speech stimulus. The long-short stimuli elicited larger MMN amplitudes for speech and music compared to short-long stimuli. An extra negativity—the late discriminative negativity (LDN)—was observed only for music. The larger MMN amplitude for long-short stimuli might be due to the familiarity of the stress pattern in speech and music. The presence of LDN for music may reflect greater long-term memory transfer for music stimuli.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1590-1600
Number of pages11
JournalPsychophysiology
Volume49
Issue number12
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2012

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