Search results for "musical instrument"
showing 10 items of 46 documents
Cortical processing of musical sounds in children with Cochlear Implants
2012
Abstract Objective We studied the neurocognitive mechanisms of musical instrument sound perception in children with Cochlear Implants (CIs) and in children with normal hearing (NH). Methods ERPs were recorded in a new multi-feature change-detection paradigm. Three magnitudes of change in fundamental frequency, musical instrument, duration, intensity increments and decrements, and presence of a temporal gap were presented amongst repeating 295 Hz piano tones. Independent Component Analysis was utilized to remove artifacts caused by the Cochlear Implants. Results The ERPs were similar in the two groups across all perceptual dimensions except for intensity increment deviants. CI children had s…
Does Tonal Information Affect the Early Stages of Visual-Word Processing in Thai?
2014
Thai offers a unique opportunity to investigate the role of lexical tone processing during visual-word recognition, as tone is explicitly expressed in its script. In order to investigate the contribution of tone at the orthographic/phonological level during the early stages of word processing in Thai, we conducted a masked priming experiment—using both lexical decision and word naming tasks. For a given target word (e.g., ห้อง/hᴐ:ŋ2/, room), five priming conditions were created: (a) identity (e.g., ห้อง/hᴐ:ŋ2/), (b) same initial consonant, but with a different tone marker (e.g., ห่อง/hᴐ:ŋ1/), (c) different initial consonant, but with the same tone marker (e.g., ศ้อง/sᴐ:ŋ2/), (d) orthograph…
A comparison of methods for investigating the perceptual center of musical sounds
2019
In speech and music, the acoustic and perceptual onset(s) of a sound are usually not congruent with its perceived temporal location. Rather, these "P-centers" are heard some milliseconds after the acoustic onset, and a variety of techniques have been used in speech and music research to find them. Here we report on a comparative study that uses various forms of the method of adjustment (aligning a click or filtered noise in-phase or anti-phase to a repeated target sound), as well as tapping in synchrony with a repeated target sound. The advantages and disadvantages of each method and probe type are discussed, and then all methods are tested using a set of musical instrument sounds that syst…
Auditory event-related potentials show altered hemispheric responses in dyslexia
2011
Dyslexia is characterized by deficits in phonological processing abilities. However, it is unclear what the underlying factors for poor phonological abilities or speech sound representations are. One hypothesis suggests that individuals with dyslexia have problems in basic acoustic perception which in turn can also cause problems in speech perception. Here basic auditory processing was assessed by auditory event-related potentials recorded for paired tones presented in an oddball paradigm in 9-year-old children with dyslexia and a familial background of dyslexia, typically reading children at familial risk for dyslexia and control children without risk for dyslexia. The tone pairs elicited …
Representation and Processing of Lexical Tone and Tonal Variants: Evidence from the Mismatch Negativity
2015
Pronunciation variation is ubiquitous in the speech signal. Different models of lexical representation have been put forward to deal with speech variability, which differ in the level as well as the nature of mental representation. We present the first mismatch negativity (MMN) study investigating the effect of allophonic variation on the mental representation and neural processing of lexical tones. Native speakers of Standard Chinese (SC) participated in an oddball electroencephalography (EEG) experiment. All stimuli have the same segments (ma) but different lexical tones: level [T1], rising [T2], and dipping [T3]. In connected speech with a T3T3 sequence, the first T3 may undergo allopho…
Hippocampus responds to auditory change in rabbits
2010
Any change or novelty in the auditory environment is potentially important for survival. The cortex has been implicated in the detection of auditory change whereas the hippocampus has been associated with the detection of auditory novelty. Local field potentials (LFPs) were recorded from the CA1 area of the hippocampus in waking rabbits. In the oddball condition, a rare tone of one frequency (deviant) randomly replaced a repeated tone of another frequency (standard). In the equal-probability condition, the standard was replaced by a set of tones of nine different frequencies in order to remove the repetitive auditory background of the deviant (now labelled as control-deviant) while preservi…
Enhanced development of auditory change detection in musically trained school-aged children: a longitudinal event-related potential study
2013
Adult musicians show superior auditory discrimination skills when compared to non-musicians. The enhanced auditory skills of musicians are reflected in the augmented amplitudes of their auditory event-related potential (ERP) responses. In the current study, we investigated longitudinally the development of auditory discrimination skills in musically trained and nontrained individuals. To this end, we recorded the mismatch negativity (MMN) and P3a responses from children who play a musical instrument and age-matched children with no musical training at ages 7, 9, 11, and 13. Basic auditory processing was investigated by recording ERPs in the Multi-Feature Paradigm that included frequency, du…
Effect of different treatments in calcium-free medium on basal tone and contractile responses of guinea pig tracheae.
1995
Acetylcholine (ACh; 0.1 mmol/l) and KCl (80 mmol/l) induce a biphasic contractile response in isolated guinea pig tracheae maintained at 37 degrees C either in the presence or absence of extracellular Ca2+. Exposure of the tissue to Ca(2+)-free solution evokes a significant decrease in basal tone and the sources of Ca2+ appear to be decreased by prolonged agonist stimulation, and even more by successive agonist stimulation. After an incubation period of 20 min in Ca(2+)-containing solution, the response is restored. Mg(2+)-depletion in Ca(2+)-free medium increased the contractile response to ACh, but not to KCl, and delayed the tonic component of the next contraction elicited in Ca(2+)-cont…
A comparison of the effects for sustained versus shifted attention on dichotic listening performance.
2009
We measured the effect of two types of directed attention instructions, sustained by a verbal cue or shifted by a tone cue with different time intervals (150, 450, and 750 ms), on a consonant-vowel dichotic listening (C-V DL) test for a large group of right- and left-handed participants of both sexes. An increasing of the hits and a decreasing of the intrusions from the baseline DL test scores was evident for both types of attentional manipulations, with no differences regarding sex or handedness. Increasing the time from 150 to 450 ms benefited the focusing of attention but this advantage was markedly attenuated at the longer 750-ms interval. The improving effect was seen for the hits of b…
Loudness changes induced by a proximal sound: loudness enhancement, loudness recalibration, or both?
2007
The effect of a forward masker on the loudness of a target tone in close temporal proximity was investigated. Loudness matches between a target and a comparison tone at the same frequency were obtained for a wide range of target and masker levels. Contrary to the hypothesis by Scharf, Buus, and Nieder [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 112, 807-810 (2002)], these matches could not be explained by an effect of the masker on the comparison loudness, which was measured by loudness matches between the comparison and a fourth tone separated in frequency from the comparison and the masker. The data thus demonstrate that a forward masker has an effect on the loudness of a proximal target. The results are compat…