An Electrophysiological Study of Infants' Sensitivity to the Sound Patterns of English Speech

1998 ◽  
Vol 41 (4) ◽  
pp. 874-886 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valerie L. Shafer ◽  
David W. Shucard ◽  
Janet L. Shucard ◽  
LouAnn Gerken

The study explores 10- to 11-month-old infants' sensitivity to the phonological characteristics of their native language. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were obtained for tones that were superimposed on two versions of a story: an Unmodified version containing normal English function morphemes, and a Modified version in which the prosodic and segmental properties of a subset of function morphemes were changed to make them atypical. The 11-month-olds exhibited significantly lower amplitude ERPs to the tones during the Modified story than to the Unmodified story, whereas the 10-month-olds showed no differences. These results suggest that the 11-month-olds discriminated the two versions of the story based on their representations of the phonological properties of English. Further, the tone-probe ERP method can successfully be used to study the development of speech perception in the pre-linguistic infant.

2000 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 635-647 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. Dehaene-Lambertz ◽  
E. Dupoux ◽  
A. Gout

It is well known that speech perception is deeply affected by the phoneme categories of the native language. Recent studies have found that phonotactics, i.e., constraints on the cooccurrence of phonemes within words, also have a considerable impact on speech perception routines. For example, Japanese does not allow (nonasal) coda consonants. When presented with stimuli that violate this constraint, as in / ebzo/, Japanese adults report that they hear a /u/ between consonants, i.e., /ebuzo/. We examine this phenomenon using event-related potentials (ERPs) on French and Japanese participants in order to study how and when the phonotactic properties of the native language affect speech perception routines. Trials using four similar precursor stimuli were presented followed by a test stimulus that was either identical or different depending on the presence or absence of an epenthetic vowel /u/ between two consonants (e.g., “ebuzo ebuzo ebuzo—ebzo”). Behavioral results confirm that Japanese, unlike French participants, are not able to discriminate between identical and deviant trials. In ERPs, three mismatch responses were recorded in French participants. These responses were either absent or significantly weaker for Japanese. In particular, a component similar in latency and topography to the mismatch negativity (MMN) was recorded for French, but not for Japanese participants. Our results suggest that the impact of phonotactics takes place early in speech processing and support models of speech perception, which postulate that the input signal is directly parsed into the native language phonological format. We speculate that such a fast computation of a phonological representation should facilitate lexical access, especially in degraded conditions.


2010 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 329-339 ◽  
Author(s):  
Torsten Rahne ◽  
Michael Ziese ◽  
Dorothea Rostalski ◽  
Roland Mühler

This paper describes a logatome discrimination test for the assessment of speech perception in cochlear implant users (CI users), based on a multilingual speech database, the Oldenburg Logatome Corpus, which was originally recorded for the comparison of human and automated speech recognition. The logatome discrimination task is based on the presentation of 100 logatome pairs (i.e., nonsense syllables) with balanced representations of alternating “vowel-replacement” and “consonant-replacement” paradigms in order to assess phoneme confusions. Thirteen adult normal hearing listeners and eight adult CI users, including both good and poor performers, were included in the study and completed the test after their speech intelligibility abilities were evaluated with an established sentence test in noise. Furthermore, the discrimination abilities were measured electrophysiologically by recording the mismatch negativity (MMN) as a component of auditory event-related potentials. The results show a clear MMN response only for normal hearing listeners and CI users with good performance, correlating with their logatome discrimination abilities. Higher discrimination scores for vowel-replacement paradigms than for the consonant-replacement paradigms were found. We conclude that the logatome discrimination test is well suited to monitor the speech perception skills of CI users. Due to the large number of available spoken logatome items, the Oldenburg Logatome Corpus appears to provide a useful and powerful basis for further development of speech perception tests for CI users.


2001 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 121-143 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicolas Dumay ◽  
Abdelrhani Benraïss ◽  
Brian Barriol ◽  
Cécile Colin ◽  
Monique Radeau ◽  
...  

Phonological priming between bisyllabic (CV.CVC) spoken items was examined using both behavioral (reaction times, RTs) and electrophysiological (event-related potentials, ERPs) measures. Word and pseudoword targets were preceded by pseudoword primes. Different types of final phonological overlap between prime and target were compared. Critical pairs shared the last syllable, the rime or the coda, while unrelated pairs were used as controls. Participants performed a target shadowing task in Experiment 1 and a delayed lexical decision task in Experiment 2. RTs were measured in the first experiment and ERPs were recorded in the second experiment. The RT experiment was carried out under two presentation conditions. In Condition 1 both primes and targets were presented auditorily, while in Condition 2 the primes were presented visually and the targets auditorily. Priming effects were found in the unimodal condition only. RTs were fastest for syllable overlap, intermediate for rime overlap, and slowest for coda overlap and controls that did not differ from one another. ERPs were recorded under unimodal auditory presentation. ERP results showed that the amplitude of the auditory N400 component was smallest for syllable overlap, intermediate for rime overlap, and largest for coda overlap and controls that did not differ from one another. In both experiments, the priming effects were larger for word than for pseudoword targets. These results are best explained by the combined influences of nonlexical and lexical processes, and a comparison of the reported effects with those found in monosyllables suggests the involvement of rime and syllable representations.


2017 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 357-372 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jarmo Hämäläinen ◽  
Nicole Landi ◽  
Otto Loberg ◽  
Kaisa Lohvansuu ◽  
Kenneth Pugh ◽  
...  

Development of reading skills has been shown to be tightly linked to phonological processing skills and to some extent to speech perception abilities. Although speech perception is also known to play a role in reading development, it is not clear which processes underlie this connection. Using event-related potentials (ERPs) we investigated the speech processing mechanisms for common and uncommon sound contrasts (/ba/-/da/-/ga/ and /ata/-/at: a/) with respect to the native language of school-age children in Finland and the US. In addition, a comprehensive behavioral test battery of reading and phonological processing was administered. ERPs revealed that the children could discriminate between the speech sound contrasts (place of articulation and phoneme length) regardless of their native language. No differences emerged between the Finnish and US children in their change detection responses. The brain responses to the phoneme length contrast, however, correlated robustly with reading scores in the US children, with larger responses being linked to poorer reading skills. Finnish children also showed correlations between the reading and phonological measures and ERP responses, but the pattern of results was not as clear as for the US children. The results indicate that speech perception is linked to reading skills and this link is more robust for uncommon speech sound contrasts.


2014 ◽  
Vol 316 ◽  
pp. 110-121 ◽  
Author(s):  
Takahiro Soshi ◽  
Satoko Hisanaga ◽  
Narihiro Kodama ◽  
Yori Kanekama ◽  
Yasuhiro Samejima ◽  
...  

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Bader ◽  
Erich Schröger ◽  
Sabine Grimm

The auditory system is able to recognize auditory objects and is thought to form predictive models of them even though the acoustic information arriving at our ears is often imperfect, intermixed, or distorted. We investigated implicit regularity extraction for acoustically intact versus disrupted six-tone sound patterns via event-related potentials (ERPs). In an exact-repetition condition, identical patterns were repeated; in two distorted-repetition conditions, one randomly chosen segment in each sound pattern was replaced either by white noise or by a wrong pitch. In a roving-standard paradigm, sound patterns were repeated 1–12 times (standards) in a row before a new pattern (deviant) occurred. The participants were not informed about the roving rule and had to detect rarely occurring loudness changes. Behavioral detectability of pattern changes was assessed in a subsequent behavioral task. Pattern changes (standard vs. deviant) elicited mismatch negativity (MMN) and P3a, and were behaviorally detected above the chance level in all conditions, suggesting that the auditory system extracts regularities despite distortions in the acoustic input. However, MMN and P3a amplitude were decreased by distortions. At the level of MMN, both types of distortions caused similar impairments, suggesting that auditory regularity extraction is largely determined by the stimulus statistics of matching information. At the level of P3a, wrong-pitch distortions caused larger decreases than white-noise distortions. Wrong-pitch distortions likely prevented the engagement of restoration mechanisms and the segregation of disrupted from true pattern segments, causing stronger informational interference with the relevant pattern information.


2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mickael Causse ◽  
Fabrice Parmentier ◽  
Damien Mouratille ◽  
Dorothee Thibaut ◽  
Marie Kisselenko ◽  
...  

Of evolutionary importance, the ability to react to unexpected auditory stimuli remains critical today, especially in settings such as aircraft cockpits or air traffic control towers, characterized by high mental and auditory loads. Evidences show that both factors can negatively impact auditory attention and prevent appropriate reactions in hazardous situations. In the present study, sixty participants performed a simulated aviation task, varying in terms of mental load (no, low, high mental load), that was embedded with a concurrent tone detection paradigm, in which auditory load was manipulated by the number of different tones (1, 2 or 3). We measured both detection performance (miss, false alarm) and brain activity (event-related potentials) related to the target tone. Our results showed that both mental and auditory loads affected tone detection performance. Importantly, their combined effects had a massive impact on the percentage of missed target tones. While, in the no mental load condition, miss rate was very low with 1 (0.53%) and 2 tones (1.11%), it increased drastically with 3 tones (24.44%), and this effect was accentuated as mental load increased, yielding to the higher miss rate in the 3-tone paradigm under high mental load conditions (68.64%). Increased mental load, auditory load, and miss rate, were all associated with disrupted brain response to the target tone as showed by reductions of the P3b amplitude. In sum, our results highlight the importance of balancing mental and auditory loads to maintain or improve efficient reactions to alarms in complex environment.


2021 ◽  
pp. 155005942110633
Author(s):  
Meggan Porteous ◽  
Paniz Tavakoli ◽  
Kenneth Campbell ◽  
Allyson Dale ◽  
Addo Boafo ◽  
...  

Objectives. Suicide is the second leading cause of adolescent deaths and may be linked to difficulties with inhibitory and emotional processing. This study assessed the neural correlates of cognitive inhibition during emotional processing in adolescents hospitalized for a suicidal crisis. Methods. Event-related potentials were recorded during an emotional Go/NoGo task in 12 adolescents who attempted suicide and 12 age- and sex-matched healthy controls. Results. Compared to the control group, the suicidal group showed significantly reduced positivity at the time of the P3d (difference waveform reflecting NoGo minus Go trials) in response to happy and neutral, but not sad stimuli. For happy stimuli, this group difference was restricted to the right hemisphere. Further analyses indicated that the suicidal group had a reversed pattern of P3 amplitude in response to inhibition, with lower amplitudes in the NoGo compared to the Go conditions. Suicidal symptoms severity strongly correlated with lower amplitude of the P3d in response to neutral faces. Conclusions. These findings provide more insight into inhibition difficulties in adolescents with acute suicidal risk. Interactions between emotional and inhibition processing should be considered when treating acutely suicidal youths.


PRILOZI ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-49
Author(s):  
Silvana Markovska-Simoska ◽  
Nada Pop-Jordanova ◽  
Jordan Pop-Jordanov

Abstract In the last decade, many studies have tried to define the neural correlates of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The main aim of this study is the comparison of the ERPs independent components in the four QEEG subtypes in a group of ADHD adults as a basis for defining the corresponding endophenotypes among ADHD population. Sixty-seven adults diagnosed as ADHD according to the DSM-IV criteria and 50 age-matched control subjects participated in the study. The brain activity of the subjects was recorded by 19 channel quantitative electroencephalography (QEEG) system in two neuropsychological tasks (visual and emotional continuous performance tests). The ICA method was applied for separation of the independent ERPs components. The components were associated with distinct psychological operations, such as engagement operations (P3bP component), comparison (vcomTL and vcom TR), motor inhibition (P3supF) and monitoring (P4monCC) operations. The ERPs results point out that there is disturbance in executive functioning in investigated ADHD group obtained by the significantly lower amplitude and longer latency for the engagement (P3bP), motor inhibition (P3supF) and monitoring (P4monCC) components. Particularly, the QEEG subtype IV was with the most significant ERPs differences comparing to the other subtypes. In particular, the most prominent difference in the ERPs independent components for the QEEG subtype IV in comparison to other three subtypes, rise many questions and becomes the subject for future research. This study aims to advance and facilitate the use of neurophysiological procedures (QEEG and ERPs) in clinical practice as objective measures of ADHD for better assessment, subtyping and treatment of ADHD.


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