Search results for "Percept"

Common variance in amplitude envelope perception tasks and their impact on phoneme duration perception and reading and spelling in Finnish children w…

2009

ABSTRACTOur goal was to investigate auditory and speech perception abilities of children with and without reading disability (RD) and associations between auditory, speech perception, reading, and spelling skills. Participants were 9-year-old, Finnish-speaking children with RD (N = 30) and typically reading children (N = 30). Results showed significant group differences between the groups in phoneme duration discrimination but not in perception of amplitude modulation and rise time. Correlations among rise time discrimination, phoneme duration, and spelling accuracy were found for children with RD. Those children with poor rise time discrimination were also poor in phoneme duration discrimi…

Neural Processing of Congruent and Incongruent Audiovisual Speech in School-Age Children and Adults

2017

Audiovisual speech perception in children with developmental language disorder in degraded listening conditions.

2013

Purpose The effect of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) on the perception of audiovisual speech in children with and without developmental language disorder (DLD) was investigated by varying the noise level and the sound intensity of acoustic speech. The main hypotheses were that the McGurk effect (in which incongruent visual speech alters the auditory speech percept) would be weaker for children with DLD than for controls and that it would get stronger with decreasing SNR in both groups. Method The participants were 8-year-old children with DLD and a sample of children with normal language development. In the McGurk stimuli, the consonant uttered by the voice differed from that articulated …

Distraction and reorientation in children: A behavioral and ERP study

2004

In the context of distraction, involuntary orienting to task-irrelevant deviations and the following reorienting to task-relevant stimulus information were studied in children aged 5-6 years. In an auditory distraction paradigm, reaction times were prolonged by 51 ms in trials including a task-irrelevant stimulus deviancy. Event-related potentials (ERPs) revealed a mismatch response (MMR) at 252 ms and a reorienting negativity (RON) 476 ms post-stimulus in response to deviating sounds. These behavioral and ERP effects resemble those reported for adults. We conclude that kindergarten children are prone to distraction, although they can quite effectively but not fully shield working memory op…

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 …