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How social interaction shapes the perception of a vowel contrast: A mismatch negativity (MMN) study
Poster Session A, Wednesday, September 30, 11:00 am - 1:00 pm, Wangari Maathai
Melodie Bellegarda1, Gary Boddaert2, Sophie Dufour3, Dominique Knutsen2, Angèle Brunellière2; 1University of Granada, CIMCYC – Centro de Investigación Mente Cerebro y Comportamiento, Granada, Spain, 2Univ. Lille, CNRS, UMR 9193, SCALab – Sciences Cognitives et Sciences Affectives, Lille, France, 3Aix-Marseille Université, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Laboratoire Parole et Langage, Unité Mixte de Recherche 7309, Aix-en-Provence, France
The present study explored the extent to which a brief social interaction with a speaker of another regional variety changes the neuronal responses to the perception of phonemes. This investigation is motivated by theoretical frameworks (Bevilacqua et al., 2019; Giles et al., 1991; Pickering & Garrod, 2021) that postulate that linguistic adjustment occurs at the phonological level during social interaction. A previous study (Bellegarda et al., 2025) revealed ERP evidence for discriminating the /e/-/ε/ merger contrast in speakers who neither perceived nor produced the contrast, following interaction with a speaker who did produce it. However, it remains unclear whether speakers who perceive this contrast but with less discrimination than a stable phonemic contrast might have similar discrimination between merger and stable contrasts after interacting with a speaker who does produce it. Exploring this gap is crucial to better understand the neuronal adaptations occurring at the phonological level and the degree of neural plasticity for accessing speech representations. To address it, twelve native Northern French speakers previously identified as non-producers but reduced-sensitivity perceivers of the /e/-/ɛ/ contrast participated in the study. Participants completed a pre-posttest design including (1) a reading task and (2) a discrimination task. In the reading task, participants read sentences containing /e/-/ɛ/ and /i/-/y/ minimal pairs and F1/F2 acoustic measures were extracted. The /i/-/y/ contrast which is a stable phonemic contrast across all French-speaking regions was used as control contrast. In the discrimination task, participants listened to syllable sequences and performed same-different judgments on a final syllable (e.g., /be/-/be/-/be/ or /bɛ/) while EEG was recorded. Behavioral measures (accuracy and RTs) and event-related potential (ERP) responses were analyzed for Contrast (/e/-/ɛ/ and /i/-/y/) and Condition (same or deviant). The pre- and posttests were separated by a social interaction with a Standard French speaking confederate who produced /e/-/ɛ/ minimal pairs during a map-based collaborative task. Before the social interaction, production data showed significantly smaller Euclidean distance for the /e/-/ɛ/ contrast than for the /i/-/y/ contrast. This effect remained unchanged after the interaction. In the discrimination task, participants initially showed poorer perception for /e/-/ɛ/ than /i/-/y/, with reduced accuracy and slower RTs in deviant trials. After the interaction, the previously significant Contrast x Condition interaction was no longer significant, suggesting comparable processing of the /e/-/ɛ/ and /i/-/y/ contrasts. For the ERP responses, before the social interaction, late MMN amplitudes differed significantly between contrasts, with larger amplitudes for the /i/-/y/ contrast. After the interaction, MMN responses no longer differed between the contrasts, indicating increased neural sensitivity to the /e/-/ɛ/ contrast. The findings suggest that interacting with someone producing a non-native regional contrast can rapidly improve the processing of this contrast to the point where it is treated in a manner similar to a stable contrast. Overall, social interaction can shape perceptual phonological representations without influencing speech production, highlighting the complex and potentially dissociable nature of perception and production systems. This study opens up new perspectives on brain research into phonological adaptation.
Topic Areas: Speech Perception, Phonology