Theta activity and phase resetting during perception of French homophonous utterances

Speech perception involves segmenting a continuous stream of speech into its word components. This can be challenging in the case of homophonous utterances only differing in non-contrastive subphonemic features. Yet, the speech perception system seems able to discriminate subphonemic deviation in homophonous utterances, since it has been shown to elicit a mismatch response (MMN). Here, we focused on the oscillatory correlates, namely phase resetting and power, of non-contrastive subphonemic deviation processing in language. An oddball task that considered natural intraspeaker variability was used. Subphonemic deviance elicited intertrial phase coherence (ITC) differences in the theta band at Fz during the time window of the MMN. No differences in power were found. This suggests that the processing of subphonemic deviation in speech signals, reflected by the MMN, might rely on mechanisms of phase resetting. ITC might facilitate the synchronous firing of functional networks involved in the processing of subphonemic deviance.