Is It Speech or Song? Effect of Melody Priming on Pitch Perception of Modified Mandarin Speech

Tonal languages make use of pitch variation for distinguishing lexical semantics, and their melodic richness seems comparable to that of music. The present study investigated a novel priming effect of melody on the pitch processing of Mandarin speech. When a spoken Mandarin utterance is preceded by a musical melody, which mimics the melody of the utterance, the listener is likely to perceive this utterance as song. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine the neural substrates of this speech-to-song transformation. Pitch contours of spoken utterances were modified so that these utterances can be perceived as either speech or song. When modified speech (target) was preceded by a musical melody (prime) that mimics the speech melody, a task of judging the melodic similarity between the target and prime was associated with increased activity in the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and superior/middle temporal gyrus (STG/MTG) during target perception. We suggest that the pars triangularis of the right IFG may allocate attentional resources to the multi-modal processing of speech melody, and the STG/MTG may integrate the phonological and musical (melodic) information of this stimulus. These results are discussed in relation to subvocal rehearsal, a speech-to-song illusion, and song perception.

A bibliometric analysis on cognitive processing of emotional words

To investigate the growth of studies on emotional word processing, co-citations and co-occurring terms in related research were analyzed by using CiteSpace software. Through visualizing the references obtained from Web of Science (WoS) Core Collection of Thomson Reuters, the main research patterns and the hot research topics were identified. The research patterns include processing levels (implicit and explicit processing), the comparison between emotional and neutral words as well as visual emotional word processing under various tasks such as blink modification and subvocal rehearsal. The hot themes are: (1) the neural correlates of negative, positive and neutral words, (2) individual differences in trait anxiety, gender or eating disorders, and (3) audiovisual processing of emotional stimuli (words, faces, pictures, and sounds). Different from the previous review papers, the present study offers a new approach to visualizing relevant data over the past three decades to synthesize scientific research findings on emotional word processing. In addition, suggestions for future work in this area are provided.

Articulatory Suppression Impairs Working Memory for Ostensibly Unvocalizable Abstract Sounds

Both subvocal articulatory rehearsal and attentional refreshing have been advanced as rehearsal mechanisms for verbal material (including speech sounds) in working memory, but the mechanism of rehearsal for nonverbal sounds—especially timbral attributes of sounds—remains unclear. Since timbral attributes of sounds often have been assumed to be unvocalizable, researchers have suggested that working memory for timbre must involve an attentional or sensory (rather than subvocal) maintenance mechanism. Two experiments examined the role of subvocal rehearsal and attentional refreshing in working memory for timbre using sounds that were designed to be abstract, unvocalizable, and devoid of apparent mnemonic semantic connections. Participants heard either three (Experiment 1) or two (Experiment 2) brief (250 ms), abstract sounds. Following an 8000 ms retention interval, participants heard a single probe sound and indicated whether the probe had been a member of the original set. During the retention interval, manipulations were introduced to suppress subvocal articulatory rehearsal, attentional refreshing, or both. Across both experiments, all conditions with articulatory suppression during the retention interval showed worse memory performance than a control condition. Effects of attentional refreshing suppression were inconsistent. These experiments suggested that subvocal imitation may be an important mechanism of rehearsal in working memory for timbre—a finding that presents complications for existing theoretical perspectives on both verbal and nonverbal working memory.

Veridical and False Recall in Adults Who Stutter

Purpose This study used a false memory paradigm to explore the veridical and false recall of adults who stutter. Method Twelve adults who stutter and 12 age-matched typically fluent peers listened to and then verbally recalled lists of words that consisted of either semantic or phonological associates or an equal number of semantic and phonological associates (i.e., hybrid condition) of a single, unpresented critical “lure” word. Three parameters of recall performance were measured across these 3 conditions: (a) number of accurately recalled words, (b) order of recall (primacy vs. recency effect), and (c) number of critical lures produced (i.e., false memories). Results Significant group differences were noted in recall accuracy specific to list type and also list position as well as relative to critical lure productions. Conclusions Results suggest that certain basic memory processes (i.e., recency effect) and the processing of gist semantic information are largely intact in adults who stutter, but recall of verbatim phonological information and subvocal rehearsal may be deficient.