The purpose of this study was to determine whether the presence of subtitles on a
distracting, silent video affects the automatic mismatch negativity (MMN) response
to simple tones, consonant-vowel (CV) nonwords, or CV words. Two experiments were
conducted in this study, each including ten healthy young adult subjects. Experiment
1 investigated the effects of subtitles on the MMN response to simple tones (differing
in frequency, duration, and intensity) and speech stimuli (CV nonwords and CV words
with a /d/-/g/ contrast). Experiment 2 investigated the effects of subtitles on the
MMN response to a variety of CV nonword and word contrasts that incorporated both
small (e.g., /d/ vs. /g/) and/or large (e.g., /e:/ vs. /el/) acoustic deviances.
The results indicated that the presence or absence of subtitles on the distracting
silent video had no effect on the amplitude of the MMN or P3a responses to simple
tones, CV nonwords, or CV words. In addition, the results also indicated that movement
artifacts may be statistically reduced by the presence of subtitles on a distracting
silent video. The implications of these results are that more "engaging" (i.e., subtitled)
silent videos can be used as a distraction task for investigations into MMN responses
to speech and nonspeech stimuli in young adult subjects, without affecting the amplitude
of the responses.
Key Words
Consonant-vowel tokens - distractor task - event-related potential - mismatch negativity
- simple tones - subtitled videos - words
