Search results for "speech perception"
showing 10 items of 136 documents
(De-)Accentuation and the Processing of Information Status: Evidence from Event-Related Brain Potentials
2012
The paper reports on a perception experiment in German that investigated the neuro-cognitive processing of information structural concepts and their prosodic marking using event-related brain potentials (ERPs). Experimental conditions controlled the information status (given vs. new) of referring and non-referring target expressions (nouns vs. adjectives) and were elicited via context sentences, which did not – unlike most previous ERP studies in the field – trigger an explicit focus expectation. Target utterances displayed prosodic realizations of the critical words which differed in accent position and accent type. Electrophysiological results showed an effect of information status, maxi…
Differences in sensory processing of German vowels and physically matched non-speech sounds as revealed by the mismatch negativity (MMN) of the human…
2014
We compared processing of speech and non-speech by means of the mismatch negativity (MMN). For this purpose, the MMN elicited by vowels was compared to those elicited by two non-speech stimulus types: spectrally rotated vowels, having the same stimulus complexity as the speech stimuli, and sounds based on the bands of formants of the vowels, representing non-speech stimuli of lower complexity as compared to the other stimulus types. This design allows controlling for effects of stimulus complexity when comparing neural correlates of processing speech to non-speech. Deviants within a modified multi-feature design differed either in duration or spectral property. Moreover, the difficulty to d…
A method for determining precise electrical hearing thresholds in cochlear implant users
2018
A psychoacoustic procedure designed for the precise assessment of perceptional threshold (T-level) in cochlear implant (CI) users is presented. The impact of this procedure on speech perception was investigated.Individual T-level measurements were obtained with the proposed procedure and three different speech processor fitting conditions were applied: (1) fitting familiar to the subject, T-levels unchanged, (2) T-level set to thresholds determined with the new procedure, (3) T-level set to thresholds determined with the new procedure, but T-level is decreased by 10 clinical units (CU). The impact of the different fitting conditions was measured by means of categorical loudness scaling (CLS…
Acoustical analysis of Spanish vowels produced by laryngectomized subjects.
2001
The purpose of this study was to describe the acoustic characteristics of Spanish vowels in subjects who had undergone a total laryngectomy and to compare the results with those obtained in a control group of subjects who spoke normally. Our results are discussed in relation to those obtained in previous studies with English-speaking laryngectomized patients. The comparison between English and Spanish, which differ widely in the size of their vowel inventories, will help us to determine specific or universal vowel production characteristics in these patients. Our second objective was to relate the acoustic properties of these vowels to the perceptual data obtained in our previous work (J. L…
Age of onset of Cannabis use and cognitive function in first-episode non-affective psychosis patients: Outcome at three-year follow-up
2018
In recent years, the effects of cannabis use on cognitive functions in patients with psychosis have been widely studied. Recently, special emphasis has been placed on the impact of age at the onset of consumption on cognition in these patients.349 patients with a first episode of non-affective psychosis were studied. Patients were classified as cannabis users and non-users. Users were divided, according to their age when they began using cannabis, into: early-onset (age 16) and late-onset (age ≥ 16) users. Differences between groups at baseline were studied based on sociodemographic, clinical, and cognitive variables. The groups were longitudinally (3-year) compared on cognitive variables.…
The mid-difference hump in forward-masked intensity discrimination
2008
Forward-masked intensity-difference limens (DLs) for pure-tone standards presented at low, medium, and high levels were obtained for a wide range of masker-standard level differences. At a standard level of 25 dB SPL, the masker had a significant effect on intensity resolution, and the data showed a mid-difference hump: The DL elevation was greater at intermediate than at large masker-standard level differences. These results support the hypothesis that the effect of a forward masker on intensity resolution is modulated by the similarity between the masker and the standard. For a given masker-standard level difference, the effect of the masker on the DL was larger for a 55-dB SPL than for t…
Linguistic Bias Modulates Interpretation of Speech via Neural Delta-Band Oscillations.
2017
Language comprehension requires that single words be grouped into syntactic phrases, as words in sentences are too many to memorize individually. In speech, acoustic and syntactic grouping patterns mostly align. However, when ambiguous sentences allow for alternative grouping patterns, comprehenders may form phrases that contradict speech prosody. While delta-band oscillations are known to track prosody, we hypothesized that linguistic grouping bias can modulate the interpretational impact of speech prosody in ambiguous situations, which should surface in delta-band oscillations when grouping patterns chosen by comprehenders differ from those indicated by prosody. In our auditory electroenc…
Emotional words induce enhanced brain activity in schizophrenic patients with auditory hallucinations.
2005
Neuroimaging studies of emotional response in schizophrenia have mainly used visual (faces) paradigms and shown globally reduced brain activity. None of these studies have used an auditory paradigm. Our principal aim is to evaluate the emotional response of patients with schizophrenia to neutral and emotional words. An auditory emotional paradigm based on the most frequent words heard by psychotic patients with auditory hallucinations was designed. This paradigm was applied to evaluate cerebral activation with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in 11 patients with schizophrenia with persistent hallucinations and 10 healthy subjects. We found a clear enhanced activity of the fronta…
Management of Cochlear Implant Electrode Migration.
2016
The present study reviewed a cochlear implant (CI) patient population after surgery, which received a free-fitting electrode carrier designed for hearing preservation. The aim was to determine the rate of electrode migration of the CI electrodes and present clinical and surgical implications.Retrospective patient review.Tertiary referral university hospital.Two hundred seventy-eight patients implanted uni- or bilaterally with lateral wall electrodes designed for hearing preservation (358 implants). The control group was 323 patients implanted uni- or bilaterally with preformed perimodiolar electrodes (468 implants).Determination of CI electrode migration was conducted according to a clinica…
Speech Perception: Phonological Neighborhood Effects on Word Recognition Persist Despite Semantic Sentence Context
2019
This study tested the hypothesis that two lexical properties, both phonological neighborhood density (ND) and neighborhood frequency (NF), influence the recognition of target words when preceded by either a semantically congruent or semantically neutral context. Our study is the first to test this hypothesis using a language other than English (i.e., Spanish). We used highly familiar bisyllabic nouns with medium-frequency occurrence as target words, and we expected recognition accuracy to increase as ND and NF decreased in both semanticallly congruent and semantically neutral sentences. We presented 48 undergraduate listeners with a set of 80 words, differing in ND and NF, within these two…