Mismatch Response to Native and Nonnative Vowels in Czech and Russian: Where's the Phoneme Effect?

The results point toward a lack of language-specific phoneme effect on the MMN amplitude. Although the literature mostly reports phoneme effects on the MMN, the present lack of an effect is in line with some prior studies that failed to find language-specific phoneme modulations of the MMN. This has implications for language learning and developmental research. Given the occasional lack of language-specific effects in the MMN of healthy adults, one should be cautious when interpreting MMN as an index of language maturation or competence in children or in atypical populations.