scholarly journals MisMatch Negativity-study showing pre-lexical sensitivity to both primary Final Accent and secondary Initial Accent in French

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Noémie te Rietmolen ◽  
Radouane El Yagoubi ◽  
Corine Astésano
Keyword(s):  
Mismatch Negativity ◽  
Stress Pattern ◽  
Phonological Representation ◽  
Event Related Potential ◽  
Speech Comprehension ◽  
Cognitive Representation ◽  
Metrical Structure ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Stress Patterns

AbstractIn French, accentuation is not lexically distinctive and tightly intertwined with intonation. This has led to the language being described of as ‘a language without accent’ and to French listeners being alleged ‘deaf to stress’. However, if one considers Di Cristo’s model in which the metrical structure of speech plays a central role, it becomes possible to envision stress templates underlying the cognitive representation of words. This event-related potential (erp) study examined whether French listeners are sensitive to the French primary final accent (fa) and secondary initial accent (ia), and whether the accents are part of the French phonologically expected stress pattern. Two oddball studies were carried out. In the first study, in one condition, deviants were presented without (−fa) and standards with final accent (+fa), while in another condition, these positions were switched. We obtained asymmetric mmn waveforms, such that deviants −fa elicited a larger mmn than deviants +fa (which did not elicit an mmn), pointing toward a preference for stress patterns with fa. Additionally, the difference waveforms between identical stimuli in different positions within the oddball paradigms indicated −fa stimuli to be disfavored whether they were the deviants or the standards. In the second study, standards were always presented with both the initial and final accent, while deviants were presented either without final accent (−fa) or without initial accent (−ia). Here, we obtained mmns both to deviants −fa and to deviants −ia, although −fa deviants elicited a more ample mmn. Nevertheless, the results show that French listeners are not deaf to the initial and final accents, pointing instead to an abstract phonological representation for both accents. In sum, the results argue against the notion of stress deafness for French and instead suggest accentuation to play a more important role in French speech comprehension than is currently acknowledged.

Where Is the Beat? The Neural Correlates of Lexical Stress and Rhythmical Well-formedness in Auditory Story Comprehension

2017 ◽  
Vol 29 (7) ◽  
pp. 1119-1131 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katerina D. Kandylaki ◽  
Karen Henrich ◽  
Arne Nagels ◽  
Tilo Kircher ◽  
Ulrike Domahs ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Stress Pattern ◽  
Lexical Stress ◽  
Story Comprehension ◽  
Speech Comprehension ◽  
New Approach ◽  
Sensorimotor Network ◽  
Electrophysiological Studies ◽  
Stress Patterns ◽  
Domain Independent ◽  
The Brain

While listening to continuous speech, humans process beat information to correctly identify word boundaries. The beats of language are stress patterns that are created by combining lexical (word-specific) stress patterns and the rhythm of a specific language. Sometimes, the lexical stress pattern needs to be altered to obey the rhythm of the language. This study investigated the interplay of lexical stress patterns and rhythmical well-formedness in natural speech with fMRI. Previous electrophysiological studies on cases in which a regular lexical stress pattern may be altered to obtain rhythmical well-formedness showed that even subtle rhythmic deviations are detected by the brain if attention is directed toward prosody. Here, we present a new approach to this phenomenon by having participants listen to contextually rich stories in the absence of a task targeting the manipulation. For the interaction of lexical stress and rhythmical well-formedness, we found one suprathreshold cluster localized between the cerebellum and the brain stem. For the main effect of lexical stress, we found higher BOLD responses to the retained lexical stress pattern in the bilateral SMA, bilateral postcentral gyrus, bilateral middle fontal gyrus, bilateral inferior and right superior parietal lobule, and right precuneus. These results support the view that lexical stress is processed as part of a sensorimotor network of speech comprehension. Moreover, our results connect beat processing in language to domain-independent timing perception.

scholarly journals Interplay between metrical and semantic processing in French: an N400 study

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Noémie te Rietmolen ◽  
Radouane El Yagoubi ◽  
Corine Astésano
Keyword(s):  
Speech Processing ◽  
Semantic Processing ◽  
Semantic Content ◽  
Speech Comprehension ◽  
Parietal Region ◽  
Metrical Structure ◽  
Semantic Congruity ◽  
Stress Processing ◽  
Semantic Conflict ◽  
Stress Patterns

AbstractFrench accentuation is held to belong to the level of the phrase. Consequently French is considered ‘a language without accent’ with speakers that are ‘deaf to stress’. Recent ERP-studies investigating the French initial accent (IA) however demonstrate listeners to not only discriminate between different stress patterns, but also expect words to be marked with IA early in the process of speech comprehension. Still, as words were presented in isolation, it remains unclear whether the preference applied to the lexical or to the phrasal level. In the current ERP-study, we address this ambiguity and manipulate IA on words embedded in a sentence. Furthermore, we orthogonally manipulate semantic congruity to investigate the interplay between accentuation and later speech processing stages. Results reveal an early fronto-centrally located negative deflection when words are presented without IA, indicating a general dispreference for words presented without IA. Additionally, we found an effect of semantic congruity in the centro-parietal region (the traditional region for N400), which was bigger for words without IA than for words with IA. Furthermore, we observed an interaction between metrical structure and semantic congruity such that ±IA continued to modulate N400 amplitude fronto-centrally, but only in the sentences that were semantically incongruent. The results indicate that presenting word without initial accent hinders semantic conflict resolution. This interpretation is supported by the behavioral data which show that participants were slower and made more errors words had been presented without IA. As participants attended to the semantic content of the sentences, the finding underlines the automaticity of stress processing and indicates that IA may be encoded at a lexical level where it facilitates semantic processing.

An Electrophysiological Measure of Temporal Resolution in Normal Subjects Using Frequency Modulated Signals

2002 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-49
Author(s):  
Devin L. McCaslin ◽  
Lawrence L. Feth ◽  
Gary P. Jacobson ◽  
Pamela J. Mishler
Keyword(s):  
Temporal Resolution ◽  
Mismatch Negativity ◽  
Normal Subjects ◽  
Single Step ◽  
Event Related Potential ◽  
Frequency Range ◽  
Temporal Properties ◽  
Step Duration ◽  
The Mean ◽  
Modulated Signals

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.

Auditory Mismatch Negativity and P300a Elicited by the “Optimal” Multi-feature Paradigm in Early Schizophrenia

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 ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Mismatch Negativity ◽  
Early Phase ◽  
Event Related Potentials ◽  
Event Related Potential ◽  
Positive Symptom ◽  
First Episode ◽  
Stimulus Context ◽  
Significant Group ◽  
Related Potentials ◽  
Auditory Change Detection

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.

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
Keyword(s):  
Mismatch Negativity ◽  
Acoustic Stimulus ◽  
Event Related Potential ◽  
Behavioral Study ◽  
Behavioral Task ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Negative Deflection ◽  
Acoustic Stimuli ◽  
Phonemic Contrasts

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.

scholarly journals Event-Related Potential Evidence of Enhanced Visual Processing in Auditory-Associated Cortex in Adults with Hearing Loss

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (5) ◽  
pp. 237-248
Author(s):  
Maojin Liang ◽  
Jiahao Liu ◽  
Yuexin Cai ◽  
Fei Zhao ◽  
Suijun Chen ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Hearing Loss ◽  
Visual Processing ◽  
Event Related Potentials ◽  
Event Related Potential ◽  
Occipital Area ◽  
Mapping Analysis ◽  
Related Potentials ◽  
The Difference ◽  
The Right ◽  
Frontotemporal Area

Objective: The present study investigated the characteristics of visual processing in the auditory-associated cortex in adults with hearing loss using event-related potentials. Methods: Ten subjects with bilateral postlingual hearing loss were recruited. Ten age- and sex-matched normal-hearing subjects were included as controls. Visual (“sound” and “non-sound” photos)-evoked potentials were performed. The P170 response in the occipital area as well as N1 and N2 responses in FC3 and FC4 were analyzed. Results: Adults with hearing loss had higher P170 amplitudes, significantly higher N2 amplitudes, and shorter N2 latency in response to “sound” and “non-sound” photo stimuli at both FC3 and FC4, with the exception of the N2 amplitude which responded to “sound” photo stimuli at FC3. Further topographic mapping analysis revealed that patients had a large difference in response to “sound” and “non-sound” photos in the right frontotemporal area, starting from approximately 200 to 400 ms. Localization of source showed the difference to be located in the middle frontal gyrus region (BA10) at around 266 ms. Conclusions: The significantly stronger responses to visual stimuli indicate enhanced visual processing in the auditory-associated cortex in adults with hearing loss, which may be attributed to cortical visual reorganization involving the right frontotemporal cortex.

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