Hemispheric processing of duration changes in speech and non-speech sounds

Sound duration conveys phonemic information in some languages. The present study, using magnetoencephalography (MEG), examined whether the hemispheric activation associated with the processing of duration is different between speech and non-speech sounds in subjects whose native language uses duration as a phonemic cue. The magnetic mismatch negativity (MMNm) response was recorded for equal-duration decrements in vowel, sinusoidal, and spectrally rich complex sounds. Although the MMNm responses to duration changes were predominant in the right hemisphere, the distribution of this response for the vowel stimuli was significantly displaced leftward compared with that for the other two types of stimuli. The results suggest that the hemispheric distribution of the MMNm response to duration change depends on the linguistic relevance of the change.