Difference of speech-evoked electroencephalography between native and non-native listeners

Abstract

Language is one the factors that can affect people’s understanding depending on the proficiency of the speaker. The natives comprehend their language easily as compared to non-natives. This may be associated to the difference in brain responses to speech stimuli between native and non-native speakers. Previous studies have proposed sentence comprehension models, such as acoustic-phonetic processor, semantic relations, grammatical relations, prosodic processes and interpretation. This study provides insight into discrepancy in brain activation pattern among speakers (native vs non-native) based on the aforementioned model but only in regards to semantic and grammar. In addition, the cross-correlation function, which is computed from Event Related Potential and speech features, is extracted as a feature of brain activation. Our results show the language effect in early and late processing in both native and non-native speakers. It also suggests that in the case of a different language, our brain tend to concentrate more on syntactic information rather than semantic information.