Search results for "Auditory"

Auditory, speech and language development in young children with cochlear implants compared with children with normal hearing.

2010

Abstract Objective This study had two aims: (1) to document the auditory and lexical development of children who are deaf and received the first cochlear implant (CI) by the age of 16 months and the second CI by the age of 31 months and (2) to compare these children's results with those of children with normal hearing (NH). Methods This longitudinal study included five children with NH and five with sensorineural deafness. All children of the second group were observed for 36 months after the first fitting of the device (cochlear implant). The auditory development of the CI group was documented every 3 months up to the age of two years in hearing age and chronological age and for the NH gro…

Event-related brain potentials to change in the frequency and temporal structure of sounds in typically developing 5-6-year-old children.

2015

The brain's ability to recognize different acoustic cues (e.g., frequency changes in rapid temporal succession) is important for speech perception and thus for successful language development. Here we report on distinct event-related potentials (ERPs) in 5-6-year-old children recorded in a passive oddball paradigm to repeated tone pair stimuli with a frequency change in the second tone in the pair, replicating earlier findings. An occasional insertion of a third tone within the tone pair generated a more merged pattern, which has not been reported previously in 5-6-year-old children. Both types of deviations elicited pre-attentive discriminative mismatch negativity (MMN) and late discrimina…

2013

To identify factors limiting performance in multitone intensity discrimination, we presented sequences of five pure tones alternating in level between loud (85 dB SPL) and soft (30, 55, or 80 dB SPL). In the “overall-intensity task”, listeners detected a level increment on all of the five tones. In the “masking task”, the level increment was imposed only on the soft tones, rendering the soft tones targets and loud tones task-irrelevant maskers. Decision weights quantifying the importance of the five tone levels for the decision were estimated using methods of molecular psychophysics. Compatible with previous studies, listeners placed higher weights on the loud tones than on the soft tones i…

Electrophysiological Correlates of Aesthetic Music Processing

2009

We analyzed the processes of making aesthetic judgments of music, focusing on the differences between music experts and laypersons. Sixteen students of musicology and 16 control subjects (also students) judged the aesthetic value as well as the harmonic correctness of chord sequences. Event-related potential (ERP) data indicate differences between experts and laypersons in making aesthetic judgments at three different processing stages. Additionally, effects of expertise on ERP components that have previously been proven to be sensitive to musical training were replicated. The study thus provides insights into the effects of musical expertise on neural correlates of aesthetic music processi…

Categorization of Extremely Brief Auditory Stimuli: Domain-Specific or Domain-General Processes?

2011

The present study investigated the minimum amount of auditory stimulation that allows differentiation of spoken voices, instrumental music, and environmental sounds. Three new findings were reported. 1) All stimuli were categorized above chance level with 50 ms-segments. 2) When a peak-level normalization was applied, music and voices started to be accurately categorized with 20 ms-segments. When the root-mean-square (RMS) energy of the stimuli was equalized, voice stimuli were better recognized than music and environmental sounds. 3) Further psychoacoustical analyses suggest that the categorization of extremely brief auditory stimuli depends on the variability of their spectral envelope in…

Connectivity patterns during music listening: Evidence for action-based processing in musicians

2017

Musical expertise is visible both in the morphology and functionality of the brain. Recent research indicates that functional integration between multi-sensory, somato-motor, default-mode (DMN), and salience (SN) networks of the brain differentiates musicians from non-musicians during resting state. Here, we aimed at determining whether brain networks differentially exchange information in musicians as opposed to non-musicians during naturalistic music listening. Whole-brain graph-theory analyses were performed on participants' fMRI responses. Group-level differences revealed that musicians' primary hubs comprised cerebral and cerebellar sensorimotor regions whereas non-musicians' dominant …

Cortical neuroplasticity in children after early cochlear implantation

2009

Hearing is crucial to learn and use language. Loss of hearing in children affects the development of speech, language and cognitive abilities, and severely impairs social capabilities. Thus, efforts to restore auditory perception are determinative and research should be focused on factors likely to bring about the best prognosis. Numerous experimental observations demonstrate that there is a sensitive or critical period for cochlear implantation. Implantations performed in prelingually deaf children in this period are associated with better results in terms of speech recognition and language acquisition. This is the time period in which brain plasticity shows its highest level of developmen…

Temporal weights in the perception of sound intensity: Effects of sound duration and number of temporal segments

2018

Loudness is a fundamental aspect of auditory perception that is closely related to the physical level of the sound. However, it has been demonstrated that, in contrast to a sound level meter, human listeners do not weight all temporal segments of a sound equally. Instead, the beginning of a sound is more important for loudness estimation than later temporal portions. The present study investigates the mechanism underlying this primacy effect by varying the number of equal-duration temporal segments (5 and 20) and the total duration of the sound (1.0 to 10.0 s) in a factorial design. Pronounced primacy effects were observed for all 20-segment sounds. The temporal weights for the five-segment…

The Garden and Landscape as an Interdisciplinary Resource Between Experimental Science and Artistic-Musical Expression: Analysis of Competence Develo…

2020

The garden is a major educational resource that can be used for all areas of knowledge from an interdisciplinary perspective as it reflects the complexity and interactions of the natural environment. This research was carried out in the academic years 2017-2018 and 2018-2019 with 418 participants of from the second, third, and fourth year of the Degree in Primary Education at the University of Valencia. The use of the garden and the landscape is analyzed as a non-formal context for training primary school teachers through sensory experiences that contribute to the development of scientific and artistic competencies. The study focused on the relationship between natural sounds and emotions t…

Can animation compensate for temporal processing difficulties in deaf people?

2020

International audience; This article addresses the issue of animation as an aid for temporal processing difficulties in deaf people learning the Highway Code. A decision‐making task involving static or animated road situations was performed by 21 deaf and 24 hearing participants. They were confronted with four types of driving situations (overtaking, negotiating roundabouts, highways, and intersections) and had to decide whether or not to proceed. Participants were presented with two different formats (static vs. animated) and two levels of difficulty (simple vs. complex). Results showed that deaf participants had poorer performances in the static condition than hearing participants. Perfor…