2.3. Procedure
The experiment was performed on a Dell Latitude C500, using the Presentation software from Neurobehavioral Systems (San Francisco; http//www.neuro-bs.com). The stimuli were presented through headphones (SONY MDR-CD270) and responses made by clicking on mouse buttons. The task was a phoneme discrimination in which the subjects were required to determine whether two stimuli were identical in terms of category (as opposed to being physically identical). Subjects began with a training session using 12 pairs of pseudowords of French which differed in either the first consonant or the first vowel. The 138 pairs of Korean pseudowords were then presented, in random order. The second stimulus in a pair appeared 500 ms after the first. A one second delay separated the subject's response from the beginning of the following trial. Subjects were required to indicate whether the two words of the pair were same or different by pressing a given button on the mouse (left=same, right=different) as quickly and accurately as possible. At the beginning of the experiment, subjects were reminded that Korean phonemes differed from French phonemes.