0000000000624042
AUTHOR
Hua Shu
Passive exposure to speech sounds modifies change detection brain responses in adults
In early life auditory discrimination ability can be enhanced by passive sound exposure. In contrast, in adulthood passive exposure seems to be insufficient to promote discrimination ability, but this has been tested only with a single short exposure session in humans. We tested whether passive exposure to unfamiliar auditory stimuli can result in enhanced cortical discrimination ability and change detection in adult humans, and whether the possible learning effect generalizes to different stimuli. To address these issues, we exposed adult Finnish participants to Chinese lexical tones passively for 2 h per day on 4 consecutive days. Behavioral responses and the brain's event-related potenti…
Reading Skills, Acquisition of: Cultural, Environmental, and Developmental Impediments
Reading acquisition is under the influence of the structure and function of the language itself, the individual's capacity to learn and the differential methods of instruction. Alphabetic languages vary from the bidirectionally consistent phoneme–grapheme–phoneme units of Finnish, to English as the most inconsistent for small units, but the latter of which increases in consistency as a function of increasing size of the unit (e.g., rime). Nonalphabetic Chinese places a heavy learning load through its inherently meaning-based logographic structure. Computer-assisted literacy training (e.g., GraphoGame) tailored to language features, teaching practices, and learner specific requirements can p…