Jin, YuDíaz Menéndez, Begoña, 1979-Colomer, MarcSebastián Gallés, Núria2016-02-172016-02-172014Jin Y, Diaz B, Colomer M, Sebastian-Galles N. Oscillation encoding of individual differences in speech perception. 2014;9(7):1-7. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.01009011932-6203http://hdl.handle.net/10230/25867Individual differences in second language (L2) phoneme perception (within the normal population) have been related to/nspeech perception abilities, also observed in the native language, in studies assessing the electrophysiological response/nmismatch negativity (MMN). Here, we investigate the brain oscillatory dynamics in the theta band, the spectral correlate of/nthe MMN, that underpin success in phoneme learning. Using previous data obtained in an MMN paradigm, the dynamics of/ncortical oscillations while perceiving native and unknown phonemes and nonlinguistic stimuli were studied in two groups/nof participants classified as good and poor perceivers (GPs and PPs), according to their L2 phoneme discrimination abilities./nThe results showed that for GPs, as compared to PPs, processing of a native phoneme change produced a significant/nincrease in theta power. Stimulus time-locked analysis event-related spectral perturbation (ERSP) showed differences for the/ntheta band within the MMN time window (between 70 and 240 ms) for the native deviant phoneme. No other significant/ndifference between the two groups was observed for the other phoneme or nonlinguistic stimuli. The dynamic patterns in/nthe theta-band may reflect early automatic change detection for familiar speech sounds in the brain. The behavioral/ndifferences between the two groups may reflect individual variations in activating brain circuits at a perceptual level.application/pdfeng© 2014 Jin et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted/nuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are creditedinfo:eu-repo/semantics/articlehttp://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0100901info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess