Journal of Brain Research  is an scientific, peer reviewed journal that covers research in all the aspects of Neuroscience, Neurodegenerative diseases, Experimental neurology, Functional neurology, Traumatic Brain injury, surgical neurology, Neurological rehabilitation, Neurotoxicology, Neuropharmacology, Neuronal plasticity and Behaviour, clinical neurology, Brain development and Cell differentiation. The Journal aims to provide a platform for the exchange of scientific information addressing research topics in the field of Brain and Neurological sciences.

We argue, based on a study of brain responses to speech sound differences in Japanese, that memory encoding of functional speech sounds—phonemes—are highly abstract. As an example, we provide evidence for a theory where the consonants are not only made up of symbolic features but are underspecified with respect to voicing or laryngeal features, and that languages differ with respect to which feature value is underspecified. In a previous study we showed that voiced stops are underspecified in English , as shown by asymmetries in Mismatch Negativity responses to /t/ and /d/. In the current study, we test the prediction that the opposite asymmetry should be observed in Japanese, if voiceless stops are underspecified in that language. Our results confirm this prediction. This matches a linguistic architecture where phonemes are highly abstract and do not encode actual physical characteristics of the corresponding speech sounds, but rather different subsets of abstract distinctive features.

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