Search results for "consonant"

How do illiterate adults react to metalinguistic training?

2013

The present study focuses on the capacity of illiterate adults to master three different metalinguistic tasks: judgment of phonological length of words, initial consonant deletion, and lexical segmentation of sentences. Illiterates’ performance, during a pre-test and after training, was compared with that of literates and partial illiterates (adults at the beginning of the process of acquiring literacy) who received the same training. In the pre-test, illiterates were lower than literates in the three tasks; and partial-illiterates were at an intermediate level in two of the tasks. The three groups profited from the training, especially illiterates and partial-illiterates for whom improveme…

Event-related potentials as a measure of speech cue processing in newborns with genetic risk for dyslexia

1999

Does conal prime CANAL more than cinal? Masked phonological priming effects in Spanish with the lexical decision task.

2005

Evidence for an early involvement of phonology in word identification usually relies on the comparison between a target word preceded by a homophonic prime and an orthographic control (rait-RATE vs. raut-RATE). This comparison rests on the assumption that the two control primes are equally orthographically similar to the target. Here, we tested for phonological effects with a masked priming paradigm in which orthographic similarity between priming conditions was perfectly controlled at the letter level and in which identification of the prime was virtually at chance for both stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) (66 and 50 msec). In the key prime-target pairs, each prime differed from the targ…

On the nature of consonant/vowel differences in letter position coding: Evidence from developing and adult readers

2016

In skilled adult readers, transposed-letter effects (jugde-JUDGE) are greater for consonant than for vowel transpositions. These differences are often attributed to phonological rather than orthographic processing. To examine this issue, we employed a scenario in which phonological involvement varies as a function of reading experience: a masked priming lexical decision task with 50-ms primes in adult and developing readers. Indeed, masked phonological priming at this prime duration has been consistently reported in adults, but not in developing readers (Davis, Castles, & Iakovidis, 1998). Thus, if consonant/vowel asymmetries in letter position coding with adults are due to phonological inf…

Audiovisual attention boosts letter-speech sound integration

2013

We studied attention effects on the integration of written and spoken syllables in fluent adult readers by using event-related brain potentials. Auditory consonant-vowel syllables, including consonant and frequency changes, were presented in synchrony with written syllables or their scrambled images. Participants responded to longer-duration auditory targets (auditory attention), longer-duration visual targets (visual attention), longer-duration auditory and visual targets (audiovisual attention), or counted backwards mentally. We found larger negative responses for spoken consonant changes when they were accompanied by written syllables than when they were accompanied by scrambled text. Th…

Spike train statistics for consonant and dissonant musical accords in a simple auditory sensory model

2010

The phenomena of dissonance and consonance in a simple auditory sensory model composed of three neurons are considered. Two of them, here so-called sensory neurons, are driven by noise and subthreshold periodic signals with different ratio of frequencies, and its outputs plus noise are applied synaptically to a third neuron, so-called interneuron. We present a theoretical analysis with a probabilistic approach to investigate the interspike intervals statistics of the spike train generated by the interneuron. We find that tones with frequency ratios that are considered consonant by musicians produce at the third neuron inter-firing intervals statistics densities that are very distinctive fro…

Different Brain Mechanisms Mediate Sensitivity to Sensory Consonance and Harmonic Context: Evidence from Auditory Event-Related Brain Potentials

2001

Abstract The goal of this study was to analyze the time-course of sensory (bottom-up) and cognitive (top-down) processes that govern musical harmonic expectancy. Eight-chord sequences were presented to 12 musicians and 12 nonmusicians. Expectations for the last chord were manipulated both at the sensory level (i.e., the last chord was sensory consonant or dissonant) and at the cognitive level (the harmonic function of the target was varied by manipulating the harmonic context built up by the first six chords of the sequence). Changes in the harmonic function of the target chord mainly modulate the amplitude of a positive component peaking around 300 msec (P3) after target onset, reflecting …

Are Vowels and Consonants Processed Differently? Event-related Potential Evidence with a Delayed Letter Paradigm

2008

Abstract To investigate the neural bases of consonant and vowel processing, event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded while participants read words and pseudowords in a lexical decision task. The stimuli were displayed in three different conditions: (i) simultaneous presentation of all letters (baseline condition); (ii) presentation of all letters, except that two internal consonants were delayed for 50 msec (consonants-delayed condition); and (iii) presentation of all letters, except that two internal vowels were delayed for 50 msec (vowels-delayed condition). The behavioral results showed that, for words, response times in the consonants-delayed condition were longer than in the vowel…

Infants' brain responses for speech sound changes in fast multifeature MMN paradigm.

2013

Abstract Objective We investigated whether newborn speech-sound discrimination can be studied in 40min using fast multifeature mismatch negativity (MMN) paradigm and do the results differ from those obtained with the traditional oddball paradigm. Methods Newborns' MMN responses to five types of changes (consonant identity, F0, intensity, vowel duration and vowel identity) were recorded in the multifeature group ( N =15) and vowel duration and vowel identity changes in the oddball group ( N =13), after which the MMNs from both groups were compared with each others. Results Statistically significant MMNs in the 190–600ms time range from the stimulus onset were found for most change types in b…

Cross-cultural music cognition: cognitive methodology applied to North Sami yoiks

2000

This article is a study of melodic expectancy in North Sami yoiks, a style of music quite distinct from Western tonal music. Three different approaches were taken. The first approach was a statistical style analysis of tones in a representative corpus of 18 yoiks. The analysis determined the relative frequencies of tone onsets and two- and three-tone transitions. It also identified style characteristics, such as pentatonic orientation, the presence of two reference pitches, the frequency of large consonant intervals, and a relatively large set of possible melodic continuations. The second approach was a behavioral experiment in which listeners made judgments about melodic continuations. Thr…