In the present study we investigated the relationship
between detecting violations of structural regularities
of tone sequences and detecting deviations from temporal
regularities or repetitive spectral auditory stimulus features.
Twelve subjects were presented with randomized sequences
of two tones (differing both in frequency and intensity)
delivered alternately to the left and right ears at a constant
stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA). In separate blocks, occasional
deviant stimuli broke one, two, or three of the following
regularities: spatial alternation, the constancy of SOA,
or the dominant frequency-intensity conjunctions. Unlike
the mismatch negativity (MMN) elicited by alternation-plus-SOA
deviants, the MMN elicited by alternation-plus-conjunction
deviants was approximately equal to the sum of the two
corresponding single-deviant MMNs. These results suggest
that the preattentive change-detection system processes
infrequent violations of the structural regularities of
sound sequences together with changes in temporal regularities,
but separately from changes in repetitive spectral sound
features. The MMN elicited by the triple-deviant stimuli
corroborated these conclusions.