scholarly journals Noise Equally Degrades Central Auditory Processing in 2- and 4-Year-Old Children

2017 ◽  
Vol 60 (8) ◽  
pp. 2297-2309 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elina Niemitalo-Haapola ◽  
Sini Haapala ◽  
Teija Kujala ◽  
Antti Raappana ◽  
Tiia Kujala ◽  
...  

Purpose The aim of this study was to investigate developmental and noise-induced changes in central auditory processing indexed by event-related potentials in typically developing children. Method P1, N2, and N4 responses as well as mismatch negativities (MMNs) were recorded for standard syllables and consonants, frequency, intensity, vowel, and vowel duration changes in silent and noisy conditions in the same 14 children at the ages of 2 and 4 years. Results The P1 and N2 latencies decreased and the N2, N4, and MMN amplitudes increased with development of the children. The amplitude changes were strongest at frontal electrodes. At both ages, background noise decreased the P1 amplitude, increased the N2 amplitude, and shortened the N4 latency. The noise-induced amplitude changes of P1, N2, and N4 were strongest frontally. Furthermore, background noise degraded the MMN. At both ages, MMN was significantly elicited only by the consonant change, and at the age of 4 years, also by the vowel duration change during noise. Conclusions Developmental changes indexing maturation of central auditory processing were found from every response studied. Noise degraded sound encoding and echoic memory and impaired auditory discrimination at both ages. The older children were as vulnerable to the impact of noise as the younger children. Supplemental materials https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.5233939

Author(s):  
Wessam Mostafa Essawy

<p class="abstract"><strong>Background:</strong> Amblyaudia is a weakness in the listener’s binaural processing of auditory information. Subjects with amblyaudia also demonstrate binaural integration deficits and may display similar patterns in their evoked responses in terms of latency and amplitude of these responses. The purpose of this study was to identify the presence of amblyaudia in a population of young children subjects and to measure mismatch negativity (MMN), P300 and cortical auditory evoked potentials (CAEPs) for those individuals.</p><p class="abstract"><strong>Methods:</strong> Subjects included in this study were divided into 2 groups control group that consisted of 20 normal hearing subjects with normal developmental milestones and normal speech development. The study group (GII) consisted of 50 subjects with central auditory processing disorders (CAPDs) diagnosed by central auditory screening tests. </p><p class="abstract"><strong>Results:</strong> With using dichotic tests including dichotic digits test (DDT) and competing sentence test (CST), we could classify these cases into normal, dichotic dysaudia, amblyaudia, and amblyaudia plus with percentages (40%, 14%, 38%, 8% respectively). Using event related potentials, we found that P300 and MMN are more specific in detecting neurocognitive dysfunction related to allocation of attentional resources and immediate memory in these cases.</p><p class="abstract"><strong>Conclusions:</strong> The presence of amblyaudia in cases of central auditory processing disorders (CAPDs) and event related potentials is an objective tool for diagnosis, prognosis and follow up after rehabilitation.</p>


2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Robert L. Folmer ◽  
Jay J. Vachhani ◽  
Amy Riggins

Background. Parkinson’s disease (PD) patients are at increased risk for central auditory processing (CAP) deficits and cognitive dysfunction. However, behavioral assessments of CAP and cognitive processing used in a previous study by our research team found few significant differences in performance between early-stage PD patients and age-matched control subjects. The objective of this study is to use auditory event-related potentials (AERPs) to compare CAP and cognitive functions in a population of PD patients with a group of age-matched control subjects. Methods. AERPs in response to tonal and speech stimuli were recorded from 35 adults who had a medical diagnosis of PD (23 males and 12 females; mean   age = 66.9 ± s . d . 11.2   years ), and 35 age-matched control subjects who did not have PD or any other neurological disorders (31 males and 4 females; mean   age = 65.4 ± s . d . 12.3   years ). Auditory stimuli included pure tones (500 and 1000 Hz) to elicit the P300 response and a dichotic digits paradigm to elicit the N200 processing negativity. Results. Compared to control subjects, PD patients exhibited significantly longer latencies of P300 and N200 components and smaller amplitude N200 components. Latency and amplitude of the N200 component were significantly correlated with participants’ age. N200 amplitude was correlated with results from the Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test (RAVLT) of cognitive ability. Latency of the P300 and amplitude of the N200 components were significantly correlated with results from the Spatial Release From Masking (SRM) behavioral CAP assessment. Conclusions. AERP assessments used in this study appear to be sensitive indicators of CAP and cognitive deficits exhibited by early-stage PD patients. While few significant differences in performance on behavioral CAP and cognitive tests were previously observed between this population of PD patients and age-matched control subjects, N200 and P300 components recorded in the present study revealed impaired neural processing by the PD group.


2018 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 315-331 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paula Virtala ◽  
Minna Huotilainen ◽  
Esa Lilja ◽  
Juha Ojala ◽  
Mari Tervaniemi

Guitar distortion used in rock music modifies a chord so that new frequencies appear in its harmonic structure. A distorted dyad (power chord) has a special role in heavy metal music due to its harmonics that create a major third interval, making it similar to a major chord. We investigated how distortion affects cortical auditory processing of chords in musicians and nonmusicians. Electric guitar chords with or without distortion and with or without the interval of the major third (i.e., triads or dyads) were presented in an oddball design where one of them served as a repeating standard stimulus and others served as occasional deviants. This enabled the recording of event-related potentials (ERPs) of the electroencephalogram (EEG) related to deviance processing (the mismatch negativity MMN and the attention-related P3a component) in an ignore condition. MMN and P3a responses were elicited in most paradigms. Distorted chords in a nondistorted context only elicited early P3a responses. However, the power chord did not demonstrate a special role in the level of the ERPs. Earlier and larger MMN and P3a responses were elicited when distortion was modified compared to when only harmony (triad vs. dyad) was modified between standards and deviants. The MMN responses were largest when distortion and harmony deviated simultaneously. Musicians demonstrated larger P3a responses than nonmusicians. The results suggest mostly independent cortical auditory processing of distortion and harmony in Western individuals, and facilitated chord change processing in musicians compared to nonmusicians. While distortion has been used in heavy rock music for decades, this study is among the first ones to shed light on its cortical basis.


Author(s):  
Luodi Yu ◽  
Jiajing Zeng ◽  
Suiping Wang ◽  
Yang Zhang

Purpose This study aimed to examine whether abstract knowledge of word-level linguistic prosody is independent of or integrated with phonetic knowledge. Method Event-related potential (ERP) responses were measured from 18 adult listeners while they listened to native and nonnative word-level prosody in speech and in nonspeech. The prosodic phonology (speech) conditions included disyllabic pseudowords spoken in Chinese and in English matched for syllabic structure, duration, and intensity. The prosodic acoustic (nonspeech) conditions were hummed versions of the speech stimuli, which eliminated the phonetic content while preserving the acoustic prosodic features. Results We observed language-specific effects on the ERP that native stimuli elicited larger late negative response (LNR) amplitude than nonnative stimuli in the prosodic phonology conditions. However, no such effect was observed in the phoneme-free prosodic acoustic control conditions. Conclusions The results support the integration view that word-level linguistic prosody likely relies on the phonetic content where the acoustic cues embedded in. It remains to be examined whether the LNR may serve as a neural signature for language-specific processing of prosodic phonology beyond auditory processing of the critical acoustic cues at the suprasyllabic level.


2018 ◽  
Vol 30 (05) ◽  
pp. 1850034
Author(s):  
Yeganeh Shahsavar ◽  
Majid Ghoshuni

The main goal of this event-related potentials (ERPs) study was to assess the effects of stimulations in Stroop task in brain activities of patients with different degrees of depression. Eighteen patients (10 males, with the mean age [Formula: see text]) were asked to fill out Beck’s depression questionnaire. Electroencephalographic (EEG) signals of subjects were recorded in three channels (Pz, Cz, and Fz) during Stroop test. This test entailed 360 stimulations, which included 120 congruent, 120 incongruent, and 120 neutral stimulations. To analyze the data, 18 time features in each type of stimulus were extracted from the ERP components and the optimal features were selected. The correlation between the subjects’ scores in Beck’s depression questionnaires and the extracted time features in each recording channel was calculated in order to select the best features. Total area, and peak-to-peak time window in the Cz channel in both the congruent and incongruent stimulus showed significant correlation with Beck scores, with [Formula: see text], [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text], [Formula: see text], respectively. Consequently, given the correlation between time features and the subjects’ Beck scores with different degrees of depression, it can be interpreted that in case of growth in degrees of depression, stimulations involving congruent images would produce more challenging interferences for the patients compared to incongruent stimulations which can be more effective in diagnosing the level of disorder.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 80-115
Author(s):  
Eva Koderman

Abstract Anxiety is characterized by a sustained state of heightened vigilance due to uncertain danger, producing increased attention to a perceived threat in one's environment. To further examine this exploited the temporal resolution afforded by event-related potentials to investigate the impact of predictability of threat on early perceptual activity. We recruited 28 participants and utilized a within-subject design to examine hypervigilance in anticipation of shock, unpleasant picture and unpleasant sound during a task with unpredictable, predictable and no threat. We investigated if habituation to stimuli was present by asking the participants to rate unpleasantness and intensity of the stimuli before and after the experiment. We observed hypervigilance in the unpredictable threat of shock. Habituation was observed for the visual stimuli. The present study suggests that unpredictability enhances attentional engagement with neutral somatosensory stimuli when the threat is of the same modality, meaning we observed the presence of hypervigilance which is a characteristic of anxiety.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Solange Denervaud ◽  
Jean-François Knebel ◽  
Emeline Mullier ◽  
Patric Hagmann ◽  
Micah M. Murray

Within an inherently dynamic environment, unexpected outcomes are part of daily life. Performance monitoring allows us to detect these events and adjust behavior accordingly. The necessity of such an optimal functioning has made error-monitoring a prominent topic of research over the last decades. Event-related potentials (ERPs) have differentiated between two brain components involved in error-monitoring: the error-related negativity (ERN) and error-related positivity (Pe) that are thought to reflect detection vs. emotional/motivational processing of errors, respectively. Both ERN and Pe depend on the protracted maturation of the frontal cortices and anterior cingulate through adolescence. To our knowledge, the impact of schooling pedagogy on error-monitoring and its brain mechanisms remains unknown and was the focus of the present study. Swiss schoolchildren completed a continuous recognition task while 64-channel EEG was recorded and later analyzed within an electrical neuroimaging framework. They were enrolled either in a Montessori curriculum (N=13), consisting of self-directed learning through trial-and-error activities with sensory materials, or a traditional curriculum (N=14), focused on externally driven activities mainly based on reward feedback. The two groups were controlled for age, gender, socio-economic status, parental educational style, and scores of fluid intelligence. The ERN was significantly enhanced in Montessori schoolchildren (driven by a larger response to errors), with source estimation differences localized to the cuneus and precuneus. In contrast, the Pe was enhanced in traditional schoolchildren (driven by a larger response to correct trials), with source estimation differences localized to the ventral anterior cingulate. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis demonstrated that the ERN and Pe could reliably classify if a child was following a Montessori or traditional curriculum. Brain activity subserving error-monitoring is modulated differently according to school pedagogy.


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