Perception and production of Italian vowels: an ERP study

In the present study, cortical responses of two sustained Italian vowels, /a/ and /i/, were analyzed in perception and production tasks by using the event-related potential (ERP) technique. First, we showed that the earlier auditory waveform complex, N1/P2, was elicited in both experimental tasks by acoustically presented vowels. More interestingly, the cortical activity of auditory cortex seems to reflect different spectro-acoustical items of Italian vowels in the production task. Specifically, the vowel /a/ generated a weaker activity than /i/ as revealed by different neuronal modulations; moreover, during speech production, the auditory cortex showed a dampening and delaying of its activity in the left hemisphere.