Linguistic structure and language familiarity sharpen phoneme encoding in the brain.

Commun Biol · 2026 · PMC13168568 · PMID 41862572

Europe PMC DOI

hedged sentences

0.0680

closest p · 1.4× alpha

0.0680

boldest claim

The sentences

marginally significantp = 0.068so close (0.05 < p ≤ 0.1)

Pairwise comparisons of native versus non-native stimuli for each combination of Feature, Group, and Time showed only one marginally significant effect: for Mandarin speakers, phoneme features in the late interval exhibited earlier peak times for native language stimuli ( t (324) = –1.83, p = 0.068).

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a nonsignificant trendno p-value reported

A similar difference is also observed between words and syllables in the Turkish dataset, and a nonsignificant trend for Dutch and Mandarin speaking participants when they were listening to their native languages.

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Quoted from the open-access full text in Europe PMC under the licence the publisher applied. The sentence is reproduced exactly as published; the emphasis is ours.