ArticleNeuroImage2021
Neural representation of linguistic feature hierarchy reflects second-language proficiency.
Article in NeuroImage, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 26 papers.
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Who cites it
26 citing papers in PubMed.
- Speech Neurophysiology in Realistic Contexts: Big Hype or Big Leap?The European journal of neuroscience · 2026Review
- Linguistic structure and language familiarity sharpen phoneme encoding in the brain.Communications biology · 2026Article
- Language Experience Shapes Neural Grouping of Speech by Accent: EEG Evidence from Native, Second-Language, and Heritage Listeners.Brain sciences · 2026Article
- Neural recordings of continuous speech reveal robust signatures of prediction in second language learners of English.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Hierarchical dynamic coding coordinates speech comprehension in the human brain.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Article
- A listening advantage for native speech is reflected by attention-related activity in auditory cortex.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Differential electroencephalography responses in speech perception between native and non-native speakers.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2025Article
- Are you talking to me? How the choice of speech register impacts listeners' hierarchical encoding of speech.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- The human auditory cortex concurrently tracks syllabic and phonemic timescales via acoustic spectral flux.Science advances · 2024Article
- Encoding models for developmental cognitive computational neuroscience: Promise, challenges, and potential.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2024Review
- Article
- Effects and prediction of cognitive load on encoding model of brain response to auditory and linguistic stimuli in educational multimedia.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Linguistic modulation of the neural encoding of phonemes.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2024Article
- Neural Representations of Non-native Speech Reflect Proficiency and Interference from Native Language Knowledge.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2024Article
- Cortical encoding of phonetic onsets of both attended and ignored speech in hearing impaired individuals.PloS one · 2024Article
- Emergence of the cortical encoding of phonetic features in the first year of life.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Eelbrain, a Python toolkit for time-continuous analysis with temporal response functions.eLife · 2023Article
- Phonological acquisition depends on the timing of speech sounds: Deconvolution EEG modeling across the first five years.Science advances · 2023Article
- Article
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Acquiring a new language requires individuals to simultaneously and gradually learn linguistic attributes on multiple levels. Here, we investigated how this learning process changes the neural encoding of natural speech by assessing the encoding of the linguistic feature hierarchy in second-language listeners. Electroencephalography (EEG) signals were recorded from native Mandarin speakers with varied English proficiency and from native English speakers while they listened to audio-stories in English. We measured the temporal response functions (TRFs) for acoustic, phonemic, phonotactic, and semantic features in individual participants and found a main effect of proficiency on linguistic encoding. This effect of second-language proficiency was particularly prominent on the neural encoding of phonemes, showing stronger encoding of "new" phonemic contrasts (i.e., English contrasts that do not exist in Mandarin) with increasing proficiency. Overall, we found that the nonnative listeners with higher proficiency levels had a linguistic feature representation more similar to that of native listeners, which enabled the accurate decoding of language proficiency. This result advances our understanding of the cortical processing of linguistic information in second-language learners and provides an objective measure of language proficiency.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.