Syllabi (tentative schedule).

These two 1-week courses will be in the nature of seminars: We will read articles as background for each topic in advance, and discuss and understand. Some of the references are for background, we will not read everything (core readings will be highlighted).

Week 1 will introduce the MMN and illustrate how it can be used to tap into phonetic and phonological knowledge within and across grammars. Week 2 will introduce the idea that MMN can access the pure phoneme. We will review of how this idea has been utilized in experimental studies of underspecification (see Pavel Iosad class in week 2 for the linguistic side of this) and then show that a key prediction of the MMN linking theory that a phoneme memory trace should be insensitive to phonetic content, has received mixed evidence and is ultimately not borne out. Science is hard!

Course 1 Introduction to MMN and phonetics/phonology
Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri
Slides: EGG lecture 1 Intro to MMN.pdf Philosophy of science: linking linguistics to brain and behavior; the basics of EEG/ERPs and MMN; prediction (omission MMN) Marr 1984. Naatanen et al (2019)	Slides: EGG lecture 2 -MMN exercise with real data (we didn’t do this)	Slides: EGG MMN class 3 - MMN for linguists.pdf Phonemes across languages: Finnish vs. Estonian (Naatanen et al., 1997); phonemes in Russian vs Korean ( Kazanina et al., 2006); English-Spanish bilingual kids vs. adults (Datta et al., 2018)	Illusory epenthesis, Japanese vs French (Dehaene-Lambertz et al., 2000)	Varying standards and abstract phoneme category MMN (Phillips et al., 2000)
Course 2 Advanced topics in MMN and phonology
Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri
Underspecification MMN: German vowels (Eulitz & Lahiri, 2004)	Voicing underspecification in English (Hestvik & Durvasula, 2016; Schluter et al., 2017); Japanese (Hestvik et al., 2020)	Putting varying standards to test: Cross-category distance effects (Rhodes et al., 2019, 2022)	Within-category distance effects and evidence against symbolic memory trace (Han, 2023)	Within-category MMN (Han, 2023)

Further readings

-basics of MMN: (Naatanen, 2001; Naatanen et al., 2011; Naatanen & Kreegipuu, 2012)

-abstract category MMN (Dehaene-Lambertz, 1997, Shestakova et al., 2002,Politzer-Ahles, S., & Jap, 2024)

-underspecification (Cornell et al., 2011)

-Abstract pattern MMN (Alain et al., 1994; Bendixen et al., 2012; Pakarinen et al., 2010; Tervaniemi et al., 1994, 2001; Wacongne et al., 2011)

-Abstract feature MMN ((Monahan, 2018; Monahan et al., 2022; Fu & Monahan, 2021)

-MMN for phonological alternations (Truckenbrodt et al., 2014, Miglietta et al., 2013)

-larger MMN for cross-category vs. within-category contrasts: (Sharma et al., 1993; Sharma & Dorman, 1999)

References

Alain, C., Woods, D. L., & Ogawa, K. H. (1994). Brain indices of automatic pattern processing. NeuroReport, 6(1). https://journals.lww.com/neuroreport/fulltext/1994/12300/brain_indices_of_automatic_pattern_processing.36.aspx

Bendixen, A., Schröger, E., Ritter, W., & Winkler, I. (2012). Regularity extraction from non-adjacent sounds. Frontiers in Psychology, 3, 143. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00143

Cornell, S. A., Lahiri, A., & Eulitz, C. (2011). “What you encode is not necessarily what you store”: Evidence for sparse feature representations from mismatch negativity. Brain Research, 1394(0), 79–89. https://doi.org/http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.brainres.2011.04.001

Datta, H., Hestvik, A., Vidal, N., Tessel, C., Hisagi, M., & Shafer, V. L. (2018). Automaticity of speech processing in early bilingual adults and children. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 23(2), 429–445.

Dehaene-Lambertz, G., Dupoux, E., & Gout, A. (2000). Electrophysiological Correlates of Phonological Processing: A Cross-linguistic Study. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 12(4), 635–647. https://doi.org/10.1162/089892900562390

Eulitz, C., & Lahiri, A. (2004). Neurobiological Evidence for Abstract Phonological Representations in the Mental Lexicon during Speech Recognition. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 16(4), 577–583. https://doi.org/10.1162/089892904323057308

Fu, Z., & Monahan, P. J. (2021). Extracting Phonetic Features From Natural Classes: A Mismatch Negativity Study of Mandarin Chinese Retroflex Consonants. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 15(March), 1–15. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2021.609898

Han, C. (2023). The nature of speech representations in varying standard MMN paradigm [Doctoral thesis]. University of Delaware.

Hestvik, A., & Durvasula, K. (2016). Neurobiological evidence for voicing underspecification in English. Brain and Language. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bandl.2015.10.007

Hestvik, A., Shinohara, Y., Durvasula, K., Verdonschot, R. G., & Sakai, H. (2020). Abstractness of human speech sound representations. Brain Research, 1732(January), 146664. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brainres.2020.146664

Kazanina, N., Phillips, C., & Idsardi, W. J. (2006). The influence of meaning on the perception of speech sounds. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 103(30), 11381–11386. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0604821103

Näätänen, R. (2001). The perception of speech sounds by the human brain as reflected by the mismatch negativity (MMN) and its magnetic equivalent (MMNm). Psychophysiology, 38(1), 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1111/1469-8986.3810001

Näätänen, R., & Kreegipuu, K. (2012). The Mismatch Negativity (MMN). In S. J. Luck & E. S. Kappenman (Eds.), Oxford handbook of event-related potential components (pp. 143–157). Oxford University Press.

Näätänen, R., Kujala, T., & Winkler, I. (2011). Auditory processing that leads to conscious perception: A unique window to central auditory processing opened by the mismatch negativity and related responses. Psychophysiology, 48(1), 4–22. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-8986.2010.01114.x

Näätänen, R., Lehtokoski, A., Lennes, M., Cheour, M., Huotilainen, M., Iivonen, A., Vainio, M., Alku, P., Ilmoniemi, R. J., Luuk, A., Allik, J., Sinkkonen, J., & Alho, K. (1997). Language-specific phoneme representations revealed by electric and magnetic brain responses. Nature, 385(6615), 432–434. https://doi.org/10.1038/385432a0

Pakarinen, S., Huotilainen, M., & Näätänen, R. (2010). The mismatch negativity (MMN) with no standard stimulus. Clinical Neurophysiology, 121(7), 1043–1050. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.clinph.2010.02.009

Phillips, C., Pellathy, T., Marantz, A., Yellin, E., Wexler, K., Poeppel, D., McGinnis, M., & Roberts, T. (2000). Auditory cortex accesses phonological categories: an MEG mismatch study. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 12(6), 1038–1055. https://doi.org/10.1162/08989290051137567

Politzer-Ahles, S., & Jap, B. A. J. (2024). Can the mismatch negativity really be elicited by abstract linguistic contrasts? . Advance publication. Neurobiology of Language. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1162/nol_a_00147

Rhodes, R. (2019). Phonetic and phonemic predictions in auditory memory [Doctoral dissertation]. University of Delaware.

Rhodes, R., Avcu, E., Han, C., & Hestvik, A. (2022). Auditory predictions are phonological when phonetic information is variable. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2022.2043395

Rhodes, R., Han, C., & Hestvik, A. (2019). Phonological memory traces do not contain phonetic information. In Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics (Vol. 81, Issue 4). https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-019-01728-1

Schluter, K. T., Politzer-Ahles, S., Al Kaabi, M., & Almeida, D. (2017). Laryngeal features are phonetically abstract: Mismatch negativity evidence from Arabic, English, and Russian. Frontiers in Psychology, 8(MAY), 1–19. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00746

Sharma, A., & Dorman, M. F. (1999). Cortical auditory evoked potential correlates of categorical perception of voice-onset time. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 106(2), 1078–1083. https://doi.org/10.1121/1.428048

Sharma, A., & Dorman, M. F. (2000). Neurophysiologic correlates of cross-language phonetic perception. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 107(5), 2697–2703. https://doi.org/doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1121/1.428655

Sharma, A., Kraus, N., McGee, T., Carrell, T., & Nicol, T. (1993). Acoustic versus phonetic representation of speech as reflected by the mismatch negativity event-related potential. Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology/ Evoked Potentials, 88(1), 64–71. https://doi.org/10.1016/0168-5597(93)90029-O

Shestakova, A., Brattico, E., Huotilainen, M., Galunov, V., Soloviev, A., Sams, M., Ilmoniemi, R. J., & Näätänen, R. (2002). Abstract phoneme representations in the left temporal cortex: magnetic mismatch negativity study. Neuroreport, 13(14), 1813–1816. https://doi.org/10.1097/00001756-200210070-00025

Tervaniemi, M., Maury, S., & Näätänen, R. (1994). Neural representations of abstract stimulus features in the human brain as reflected by the mismatch negativity. Neuroreport, 5(7), 844–846. http://journals.lww.com/neuroreport/Fulltext/1994/03000/Neural_representations_of_abstract_stimulus.27.aspx

Tervaniemi, M., Rytkönen, M., Schröger, E., Ilmoniemi, R. J., & Näätänen, R. (2001). Superior Formation of Cortical Memory Traces for Melodic Patterns in Musicians. Learning & Memory, 8(5), 295–300. https://doi.org/10.1101/lm.39501

Truckenbrodt, H., Steinberg, J., & Jacobsen, T. K. (2014). Evidence for the role of German final devoicing in pre-attentive speech processing: a mismatch negativity study. Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 1317. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01317

Wacongne, C., Labyt, E., van Wassenhove, V., Bekinschtein, T., Naccache, L., & Dehaene, S. (2011). Evidence for a hierarchy of predictions and prediction errors in human cortex. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108(51), 20754–20759. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1117807108