Music and speech prosody: a common rhythm

Disorders of music and speech perception, known as amusia and aphasia, have traditionally been regarded as dissociated deficits based on studies of brain damaged patients. This has been taken as evidence that music and speech are perceived by largely separate and independent networks in the brain. However, recent studies of congenital amusia have broadened this view by showing that the deficit is associated with problems in perceiving speech prosody, especially intonation and emotional prosody. In the present study the association between the perception of music and speech prosody was investigated with healthy Finnish adults (n = 61) using an on-line music perception test including the Scal…

Quantity language speakers show enhanced subcortical processing

Abstract The complex auditory brainstem response (cABR) can reflect language-based plasticity in subcortical stages of auditory processing. It is sensitive to differences between language groups as well as stimulus properties, e.g. intensity or frequency. It is also sensitive to the synchronicity of the neural population stimulated by sound, which results in increased amplitude of wave V. Finnish is a full-fledged quantity language, in which word meaning is dependent upon duration of the vowels and consonants. Previous studies have shown that Finnish speakers have enhanced behavioural sound duration discrimination ability and larger cortical mismatch negativity (MMN) to duration change comp…

Towards the phonetic basis of spoken second language assessment : temporal features as indicators of perceived proficiency level

Linguistic multifeature MMN paradigm for extensive recording of auditory discrimination profiles

We studied whether a multifeature mismatch negativity (MMN) paradigm using naturally produced speech stimuli is feasible for studies of auditory discrimination accuracy of adult participants. A naturally produced trisyllabic pseudoword was used in the paradigm, and MMNs were recorded to changes that were acoustic (changes in fundamental frequency or intensity) or potentially phonological (changes in vowel identity or vowel duration). All the different changes were presented in three different word segments (initial, middle, or final syllable). All changes elicited an MMN response, but the vowel duration change elicited a different response pattern than the other deviant types. Changes in vo…