Neurophysiology of spectrotemporal cue organization of spoken language in auditory memory

•English listeners weight formant more than envelope dynamics in phonetic labeling.•Mismatch negativity (MMN) reflects spectrotemporal cue weighting of phonemes.•MMN consists of generators reflecting change detection and perceptual organization.

Listeners assign different weights to spectral dynamics, such as formant rise time (FRT), and temporal dynamics, such as amplitude rise time (ART), during phonetic judgments. We examined the neurophysiological basis of FRT and ART weighting in the /ba/–/wa/ contrast. Electroencephalography was recorded for thirteen adult English speakers during a mismatch negativity (MMN) design using synthetic stimuli: a /ba/ with /ba/-like FRT and ART; a /wa/ with /wa/-like FRT and ART; and a /ba/wa with /ba/-like FRT and /wa/-like ART. We hypothesized that because of stronger reliance on FRT, subjects would encode a stronger memory trace and exhibit larger MMN during the FRT than the ART contrast. Results supported this hypothesis. The effect was most robust in the later portion of MMN. Findings suggest that MMN is generated by multiple sources, differentially reflecting acoustic change detection (earlier MMN, bottom-up process) and perceptual weighting of ART and FRT (later MMN, top-down process).