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. 2020 Dec 21;10:22356. doi: 10.1038/s41598-020-79140-1

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© The Author(s) 2020

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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The native and nonnative phonetic distinction. In (a) we illustrate the synthetic consonant–vowel stimuli previously used to study categorical perception in English¹³, Hindi¹⁴, and Spanish-speakers¹⁵. This continuum comprises 16 steps (i.e. syllables) equidistant along the voiced place-of-articulation dimension from the bilabial /b/ to the dental /d/ and to the retroflex /D/, associated with the vowel /a/. Along the continuum, adult native English-speakers perceive two phonetic categories (Step1–Step6 as /ba/ and the following as /da/) while adult native Hindi-speakers perceive three (Step1–Step6 as /ba/, Step7–Step10 as /da/, and Step11–Step16 as retroflex /Da/). Adult Spanish-speakers also perceive two categories, however from Step1 to Step6 are perceived as /pa/ and the next as /ta/, due to a shorter voice onset time for these syllables in Spanish. In grey and orange, we indicate the syllables perceived as the native /pa/ and /ta/ respectively by Spanish-speaking adults, and in blue, those perceived as the nonnative /Da/ by Hindi-speaking adults. The phonetic boundaries are indicated by black vertical dotted lines. The arrow below the continuum indicates the stimulus we compared in this study to evaluate the response to phonetic and acoustic changes at the native and nonnative boundaries. In (b) we illustrate the structure of the trials. Each trial comprised the auditory presentation of four 275 ms long syllables, one every 600 ms separated by silence. The first 3 syllables were always identical, to induce habituation, while the 4th syllable remained the same in standard trials, changed to a syllable from a different phonetic category in phonetic trials or changed to a syllable of the same category in acoustic trials. Because any change between phonemes conveys a change at the acoustic and linguistic level, the subtraction of the brain response for standard and acoustic trials to the response for phonetic ones, at the native and nonnative phonetic boundaries, allowed us to quantify the purely linguistic component of the MMR.