Perception of long-distance coarticulation: An event-related potential and behavioral study

2011 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
MICHAEL GROSVALD ◽  
DAVID CORINA

ABSTRACTIn this study we explore listeners' sensitivity to vowel to vowel (VV) coarticulation, using both event-related potential (ERP) and behavioral methodologies. The stimuli used were vowels “colored” by the coarticulatory influence of other vowels across one, three or five intervening segments. The paradigm used in the ERP portion of the study was intended to elicit the mismatch-negativity (MMN) component, a negative deflection typically seen at central midline scalp sites about 200 ms after the presentation of a “deviant” acoustic stimulus occurring among a train of “standard” acoustic stimuli. VV coarticulation at near and medium distances was associated with significant MMN-like effects, which however were not observed in response to the longest distance coarticulatory contrasts. Subjects' ERP results did not predict their performance on the behavioral task, which found evidence of listener sensitivity to even the furthest distance coarticulatory effects. Although the MMN has previously been shown to be sensitive to phonemic contrasts, this is the first study using ERP methodology to investigate the subphonemic processing associated with the perception of coarticulation.

1999 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-55 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kerstin Krauel ◽  
Philipp Schott ◽  
Bernfried Sojka ◽  
Bettina M. Pause ◽  
Roman Ferstl

Abstract The mismatch negativity (MMN) is thought to indicate automatic stimulus discrimination in response to acoustic stimuli. In the present study six male subjects were presented with the odors linalool and eugenol within a passive oddball-paradigm. The subjects were instructed to ignore the odors and concentrate on an auditory distractor task. In two sessions each odor served once as the standard stimulus and once as the deviant stimulus. Both odors when presented as deviants led to a negative deflection of the olfactory event-related potential (OERP) between 500-600 ms. After 600 ms the waveforms in response to the deviants were differentially influenced by odor quality. Although the present study should be understood as exploratory, the results suggest the existence of an early mismatch detector in the olfactory modality independent of attention and odor quality.


2002 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-49
Author(s):  
Devin L. McCaslin ◽  
Lawrence L. Feth ◽  
Gary P. Jacobson ◽  
Pamela J. Mishler

This investigation was conducted to determine whether an exogenous event-related potential called the mismatch negativity (MMN) would change systematically in response to frequency-modulated signals with varying temporal properties. Both N1 and P2 waveforms were recorded for 50-ms frequency-modulated signals from normal hearing listeners. The standard stimuli for this investigation were continuous sweep tones with center frequencies of 1000 Hz that traversed a frequency range of 200 Hz in a single step. The rare stimuli were signals that traversed the same frequency range in two, four, six, or eight discrete steps. Results suggest that for the 10 participants, 1) the mean MMN peak-to-peak amplitude and mean area decreased significantly with decreases in step duration, 2) MMN area amplitude was the best indicator of psychophysical performance for the two magnitude measures, and 3) MMN onsets and peak latencies did not show either a significant increase or decrease in latency as step duration decreased.


2018 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 238-247 ◽  
Author(s):  
Derek J. Fisher ◽  
Debra J. Campbell ◽  
Shelagh C. Abriel ◽  
Emma M. L. Ells ◽  
Erica D. Rudolph ◽  
...  

The mismatch negativity (MMN) is an EEG-derived event-related potential (ERP) elicited by any violation of a predicted auditory “rule,” regardless of whether one is attending to the stimuli and is thought to reflect updating of the stimulus context. Redirection of attention toward a rare, distracting stimulus event, however, can be measured by the subsequent P3a component of the P300. Chronic schizophrenia patients exhibit robust MMN deficits, as well as reductions in P3a amplitude. While, the substantial literature on the MMN in first-episode and early phase schizophrenia in this population reports reduced amplitudes, there also exist several contradictory studies. Conversely, P3a reduction in this population is relatively consistent, although the literature investigating this is small. The primary goal of this study was to contribute to our understanding of whether auditory change detection mechanisms are altered in early phase schizophrenia and, if so, under what conditions. Event-related potentials elicited by duration, frequency, gap, intensity, and location deviants (as elicited by the “optimal” multi-feature paradigm) were recorded in 14 early phase schizophrenia (EP) patients and 17 healthy controls (HCs). Electrical activity was recorded from 15 scalp electrodes. MMN/P3a amplitudes and latencies for each deviant were compared between groups and were correlated with clinical measures in EPs. There were no significant group differences for MMN amplitudes or latencies, though EPs did exhibit reduced P3a amplitudes to gap and duration deviants. Furthermore, PANSS (Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale) positive symptom scores were correlated with intensity MMN latencies and duration P3a amplitudes in EPs. These findings suggest that MMNs may not be as robustly reduced in early phase schizophrenia (relative to chronic illness), but that alterations may be more likely in patients with increased positive symptomatology. Furthermore, these findings offer further support to previous work suggesting that the understudied P3a may have good complementary utility as a marker of early cortical dysfunction in psychosis.


2004 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-71 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. A. Altman ◽  
S. F. Vaitulevich ◽  
A. L. Varfolomeev ◽  
L. B. Shestopalova

2003 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 136-151 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ela I. Olivares ◽  
Jaime Iglesias ◽  
Socorro Rodríguez-Holguín

N400 brain event-related potential (ERP) is a mismatch negativity originally found in response to semantic incongruences of a linguistic nature and is used paradigmatically to investigate memory organization in various domains of information, including that of faces. In the present study, we analyzed different mismatch negativities evoked in N400-like paradigms related to recognition of newly learned faces with or without associated verbal information. ERPs were compared in the following conditions: (1) mismatching features (eyes-eyebrows) using a facial context corresponding to the faces learned without associated verbal information (“pure” intradomain facial processing); (2) mismatching features using a facial context corresponding to the faces learned with associated occupations and proper names (“nonpure” intradomain facial processing); (3) mismatching occupations using a facial context (cross-domain processing); and (4) mismatching names using an occupation context (intra-domain verbal processing). Results revealed that mismatching stimuli in the four conditions elicited a mismatch negativity analogous to N400 but with different timing and topo-graphical patterns. The onset of the mismatch negativity occurred earliest in Conditions 1 and 2, followed by Condition 4, and latest in Condition 3. The negativity had the shortest duration in Task 1 and the longest duration in Task 3. Bilateral parietal activity was confirmed in all conditions, in addition to a predominant right posterior temporal localization in Condition 1, a predominant right frontal localization in Condition 2, an occipital localization in Condition 3, and a more widely distributed (although with posterior predominance) localization in Condition 4. These results support the existence of multiple N400, and particularly of a nonlinguistic N400 related to purely visual information, which can be evoked by facial structure processing in the absence of verbal-semantic information.


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