Differences in sensory processing of German vowels and physically matched non-speech sounds as revealed by the mismatch negativity (MMN) of the human event-related brain potential (ERP).

We compared processing of speech and non-speech by means of the mismatch negativity (MMN). For this purpose, the MMN elicited by vowels was compared to those elicited by two non-speech stimulus types: spectrally rotated vowels, having the same stimulus complexity as the speech stimuli, and sounds based on the bands of formants of the vowels, representing non-speech stimuli of lower complexity as compared to the other stimulus types. This design allows controlling for effects of stimulus complexity when comparing neural correlates of processing speech to non-speech. Deviants within a modified multi-feature design differed either in duration or spectral property. Moreover, the difficulty to discriminate between the standard and the two deviants was controlled for each stimulus type by means of an additional active discrimination task. Vowels elicited a larger MMN compared to both non-speech stimulus types, supporting the concept of language-specific phoneme representations and the role of the participants' prior experience.