Pre-attentive Processing of Lexical Pitch Accents in South Swedish:Evidence from Mismatch Negativity

Lexical pitch accents are among the least studied tonal structures. Previous studies have investigated the neural representation of lexical tones. However, less is known about how lexical pitch accents in languages like Swedish and Norwegian are processed in the brain. In the present study, we used the electroencephalographic mismatch negativity (MMN) paradigm to sample the brain activity among South Swedish speakers passively listening to a minimal pair of words that only contrasts in word accent. An identity MMN was calculated to show the automatic phonological processing void of acoustic information. Source localization indicated involvement of the left superior temporal gyrus and inferior parietal lobe. A conjunction analysis narrowed down the core results to the inferior parietal lobe. The brain thus seems to represent Swedish lexical pitch accents similarly to other lexical tones like Mandarin word tones.