Revue internationale de psychologie scolaire et cognitive
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Gaining Mismatch Negativity! Improving Auditory Phoneme Discrimination by Literacy Training - A Pre-Post Event-Related Potential Study

Gesa Schaadt, Ann Pannekamp and Elke van der Meer

Illiteracy is still present in the society these days. Several studies have shown that illiterate individuals lack important cognitive prerequisites for literacy acquisition, such as auditory phoneme discrimination. Therefore, the current study investigated auditory phoneme discrimination in illiterate individuals before and after a one-year literacy course. We analyzed the characteristic event-related brain potential (ERP) marker for auditory phoneme discrimination, namely Mismatch Negativity (MMN).The results showed a significant enhancement of the amplitude of MMN from before to after a one-year literacy course. This finding indicates the close relationship between literacy acquisition and auditory phoneme discrimination. Further, it indicates the importance of considering discrimination training in literacy courses, especially for illiterate adults