Article
Neurosciences
Marlies Gillis, Jill Kries, Maaike Vandermosten, Tom Francart
Summary: Through EEG measurements on 52 normal-hearing adults, the study examined the effects of aging on speech processing. The results showed that linguistic speech processing declines with age, as well as acoustic neural tracking. However, older adults had shorter latencies for early acoustic responses to speech. These findings may reflect structural and/or functional changes associated with aging.
Article
Psychology, Multidisciplinary
Sarah Cheung, Molly Babel
Summary: This study examines the self-voice benefit in early bilingual individuals. The results show that listeners are more accurate in recognizing minimal pairs produced in their own voice compared to those produced by others with similar degrees of acoustic contrast.
FRONTIERS IN PSYCHOLOGY
(2022)
Article
Neurosciences
Silvia Ortiz-Mantilla, Cynthia P. Roesler, Teresa Realpe-Bonilla, April A. Benasich
Summary: Plasticity of the infant brain plays a crucial role in their interaction with environmental sensory events. Early interactive acoustic experience (IAE) improves syllable processing efficiency and has enduring effects beyond the training period. The trained group shows more mature and efficient acoustic processing, leading to better representation and discrimination of syllabic content. The IAE modulates theta phase synchrony in the left auditory cortex, which is associated with language scores.
Article
Biology
Filiz Tezcan, Hugo Weissbart, Andrea E. Martin
Summary: In this study, the researchers investigated the neural tracking of speech features during language comprehension. They found that both acoustic and phonemic features are encoded and tracked in the brain, with phonemes being tracked more strongly when language is comprehended. Additionally, the researchers discovered that the level of sentence and discourse constraint, as reflected by word entropy, impacts the encoding and tracking of both acoustic and phonemic features. These findings highlight the flexible modulation of speech features by language comprehension.
Article
Psychology
Sara Fiscella, Madeline S. Cappelloni, Ross K. Maddox
Summary: It is well established that listeners use both facial and auditory information to comprehend speech in noisy environments. This study investigated how listeners use audiovisual speech correspondences along the multisensory speech processing pathway. The results showed that temporal coherence supports early integration, but binding is minimally affected by face rotation.
ATTENTION PERCEPTION & PSYCHOPHYSICS
(2022)
Editorial Material
Linguistics
Rachel Elizabeth Weissler, Shiloh Drake, Ksenia Kampf, Carissa Diantoro, Kurtis Foster, Audrey Kirkpatrick, Isabel Preligera, Orion Wesson, Anna Wood, Melissa M. Baese-Berk
Summary: There is a consensus among psycholinguistic researchers that listening to unfamiliar speech is challenging. This commentary questions the usefulness of the construct of non-native in research, suggesting it places the burden on the listener rather than the language learner. The factors impacting perception of unfamiliar accents are examined, and recommendations for future work are made to focus on teaching listeners to better understand speakers.
APPLIED PSYCHOLINGUISTICS
(2023)
Article
Neurosciences
Giovanni M. Di Liberto, Jingping Nie, Jeremy Yeaton, Bahar Khalighinejad, Shihab A. Shamma, Nima Mesgarani
Summary: Acquiring a new language involves learning linguistic attributes on multiple levels simultaneously, with proficiency significantly influencing the neural encoding of language. Higher proficiency in nonnative listeners leads to a neural encoding more similar to that of native listeners, facilitating accurate decoding of language proficiency.
Article
Audiology & Speech-Language Pathology
Robert H. Margolis, Aparna Rao, Richard H. Wilson, George L. Saly
Summary: A method for testing auditory processing of non-linguistic speech-like stimuli was developed and evaluated. The results showed that the Senior group scored lower than the Normal group, and the Hearing Loss group scored lower than the Senior group. Age and hearing loss separately affected performance.
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF AUDIOLOGY
(2023)
Article
Acoustics
Peng Zhou, Shimin Zong, Xin Xi, Hongjun Xiao
Summary: With the COVID-19 pandemic, the usage of personal protective equipment (PPE) has become 'the new normal'. Transparent masks are recommended to solve the negative impact on speech perception caused by the use of surgical masks and N95 masks with a face shield. However, there is a lack of quantitative studies regarding the effect of PPE on speech perception. This study aimed to compare the effect on speech perception of different types of PPE (surgical masks, N95 masks with face shield and transparent masks) in healthcare settings, for listeners with normal hearing in the audiovisual or auditory-only modality. The results confirmed that wearing a surgical mask or an N95 mask with face shield has a negative impact on speech perception, but wearing a transparent mask improved speech perception to a similar level as unmasked condition for young normal-hearing listeners.
Article
Neurosciences
Yiguang Liu, Cheng Luo, Jing Zheng, Junying Liang, Nai Ding
Summary: Working memory load can modulate the neural activity of different linguistic units during speech processing. Verbal and visual working memory load have similar effects on speech processing, possibly influenced by the domain-general component of the working memory system. Furthermore, working memory load asymmetrically affects lower-level auditory encoding and higher-level linguistic processing, reflecting the reallocation of attention induced by mnemonic load.
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Lei Pan, Han Ke, Suzy J. Styles
Summary: This study investigates the influence of early childhood exposure on phoneme perception models in early English-Mandarin bilingual adults. The results suggest that individuals who were exposed to English at an earlier age show a greater sensitivity towards phoneme boundaries, indicating a transfer of phoneme models from earlier/stronger languages to later/weaker languages.
SCIENTIFIC REPORTS
(2022)
Article
Biology
Cecilia Mares, Ricardo Echavarria Solana, M. Florencia Assaneo
Summary: The ability to synchronize body movements with auditory stimuli varies among adults and shows substantial individual differences. This ability is essential in humans for speech and music, but little attention has been given to how acoustic features and individual differences modulate auditory-motor synchrony. The study found that while most individuals can synchronize to sequences composed of the same acoustic unit, a subgroup of participants struggles when the unit's identity varies. However, synchronization can be temporarily restored in this group with the help of a facilitator stimulus. Auditory-motor integration is stable across effectors but influenced by the acoustic features of the stimulus and individual abilities.
COMMUNICATIONS BIOLOGY
(2023)
Article
Neurosciences
Eline Verschueren, Marlies Gillis, Lien Decruy, Jonas Vanthornhout, Tom Francart
Summary: When listening to continuous speech, the human brain can track both acoustic and linguistic features, but they have different impacts on speech understanding. Increasing speech rate leads to more acoustic information but makes linguistic tracking more challenging. Linguistic neural tracking may be a more direct predictor of speech understanding.
JOURNAL OF NEUROSCIENCE
(2022)
Article
Neurosciences
Adam Kenji Yamamoto, Ana Sanjuan, Rebecca Pope, Oiwi Parker Jones, Thomas M. H. Hope, Susan Prejawa, Marion Oberhuber, Laura Mancini, Justyna O. Ekert, Andrea Garjardo-Vidal, Megan Creasey, Tarek A. Yousry, David W. Green, Cathy J. Price
Summary: Using fMRI, researchers investigated the effects of right temporal lobe gliomas on neural processing during speech perception and production tasks. The study found that patients with right postero-superior temporal lobe tumors showed under-activation during auditory semantic matching, but over-activation during object naming. These findings highlight the importance of the right temporal lobe for language processing and suggest the need for further research on the effects of right temporal lobe tumors on language performance and neural reorganization.
FRONTIERS IN HUMAN NEUROSCIENCE
(2022)
Article
Acoustics
Silvana Punisic, Slobodan T. Jovicic, Misko Subotic, Jasmina Stojanovic
Summary: This study investigated the perceptual discrimination between typical and atypical duration and intensity of the fricative consonant /integral/. Results indicated regions of typical and atypical values for duration and intensity of the fricative in Serbian language, and showed that intensity distortion does not influence perception of distortion in time domain, except in the case of weak friction. In two-dimensional perception, duration had higher perceptual significance for normal fricative, while intensity had higher perceptual significance for distorted fricative. SLPs reported selectively recognizing the dominant distortion first in two-dimensional perception tasks.
Article
Neurosciences
Jose Sanchez-Bornot, Roberto C. Sotero, J. A. Scott Kelso, Ozguer Simsek, Damien Coyle
Summary: This study proposes a multi-penalized state-space model for analyzing unobserved dynamics, using a data-driven regularization method. Novel algorithms are developed to solve the model, and a cross-validation method is introduced to evaluate regularization parameters. The effectiveness of this method is validated through simulations and real data analysis, enabling a more accurate exploration of cognitive brain functions.