La mie de pain n’est pas une amie: une étude EEG sur la perception de différences infra-phonémiques en situation de variations

Abstract : We examined electrophysiological correlates of listener’s sensitivity to fine acoustic cues in intra-speaker variability conditions in order to test the relevance of such cues for the speech perception system. For this purpose, a modified oddball paradigm has been used with syllables such as French homophones la and l’a, and in a second experiment with longer sequences such as la mie and l’amie, both /lami/. The main result of this study was the observation of a mismatch negativity (MMN) for homophone deviants. Speech perception system is thus sensitive to subphonemic differences between homophone sequences despite the speech variability. Fine acoustic cues are robust enough to play a role in speech processing