Monolingual, Non-tone Bilingual, and Tone Bilingual Infants: Language Experiences Alter Speech and Nonspeech Perception.

Studies on first-year infants' pitch perception have witnessed shifts of perceptual focus from acoustic to linguistic information and from a wide range of contrasts to those relevant to their native language. Nevertheless, how linguistic experience interacts with this developmental process remains an open question. This study compared the neural discrimination of speech/lexical and nonspeech/violin tone contrasts by 5- to 6- and 11- to 12-month-old infants across three types of language backgrounds: monolingual infants learning a non-tone language (Mono), bilingual infants learning two non-tone languages (Bi-NT), and bilingual infants learning a non-tone and a tone language (Bi-Tone).

Test-Retest Reliability of Mismatch Negativity and Late Discriminative Negativity Response in Children With Listening Difficulties.

The aim of the study was to determine the test-retest reliability of MMN and LDN recorded to simple speech contrasts in children with listening difficulties. MMN and LDN responses were recorded from Fz and Cz electrodes for a /da/-/ga/ contrast twice within a 10-day period. To extract MMN and LDN, auditory-evoked responses to /ga/ stimuli presented alone were subtracted from the responses to /ga/ presented within an oddball sequence.

Atypical low-frequency cortical encoding of speech identifies children with developmental dyslexia.

Slow cortical oscillations play a crucial role in processing the speech amplitude envelope, which is perceived atypically by children with developmental dyslexia. Here we use electroencephalography (EEG) recorded during natural speech listening to identify neural processing patterns involving slow oscillations that may characterize children with dyslexia. In a story listening paradigm, we find that atypical power dynamics and phase-amplitude coupling between delta and theta oscillations characterize dyslexic versus other child control groups (typically-developing controls, other language disorder controls).

Impaired neural entrainment to low frequency amplitude modulations in English-speaking children with dyslexia or dyslexia and DLD.

Neural synchronization to amplitude-modulated noise at three frequencies (2 Hz, 5 Hz, 8 Hz) thought to be important for syllable perception was investigated in English-speaking school-aged children. The theoretically-important delta-band (∼2Hz, stressed syllable level) was included along with two syllable-level rates. The auditory steady state response (ASSR) was recorded using EEG in 36 7-to-12-year-old children.

Infants show enhanced neural responses to musical meter frequencies beyond low-level features.

Music listening often entails spontaneous perception and body movement to a periodic pulse-like meter. There is increasing evidence that this cross-cultural ability relates to neural processes that selectively enhance metric periodicities, even when these periodicities are not prominent in the acoustic stimulus. However, whether these neural processes emerge early in development remains largely unknown.

Language specificity in cortical tracking of speech rhythm at the mora, syllable, and foot levels.

Recent research shows that adults' neural oscillations track the rhythm of the speech signal. However, the extent to which this tracking is driven by the acoustics of the signal, or by language-specific processing remains unknown. Here adult native listeners of three rhythmically different languages (English, French, Japanese) were compared on their cortical tracking of speech envelopes synthesized in their three native languages, which allowed for coding at each of the three language's dominant rhythmic unit, respectively the foot (2.

English and Mandarin native speakers' cue-weighting of lexical stress: Results from MMN and LDN.

Past research on how listeners weight stress cues such as pitch, duration and intensity has reported two inconsistent patternss: listeners' weighting conforms to 1) their native language experience (e.g., language rhythmicity, lexical tone), and 2) a general "iambic-trochaic law" (ITL), favouring innate sound groupings in cue perception.

Babies detect when the timing is right: Evidence from event-related potentials to a contingent mother-infant conversation.

Social interactions are vital for healthy brain development. Burgeoning behavioural evidence indicates that a caregiver who provides contingently timed vocal responses to infant vocalisations provides key support for early language development. Understanding how contingently timed vocal responses relate to neurodevelopment in early infancy is lacking.

Electrophysiological and behavioural study of localisation in presence of noise.

Objective: The ability to determine the location of the sound source is often important for effective communication. However, it is not clear how the localisation is affected by background noise. In the current study, localisation in quiet versus noise was evaluated in adults both behaviourally, and using MMN and P3b.

Infant-directed speech facilitates seven-month-old infants' cortical tracking of speech.

This study assessed cortical tracking of temporal information in incoming natural speech in seven-month-old infants. Cortical tracking refers to the process by which neural activity follows the dynamic patterns of the speech input. In adults, it has been shown to involve attentional mechanisms and to facilitate effective speech encoding.

Weighting of Amplitude and Formant Rise Time Cues by School-Aged Children: A Mismatch Negativity Study.

Purpose: An important skill in the development of speech perception is to apply optimal weights to acoustic cues so that phonemic information is recovered from speech with minimum effort. Here, we investigated the development of acoustic cue weighting of amplitude rise time (ART) and formant rise time (FRT) cues in children as measured by mismatch negativity (MMN).

Method: Twelve adults and 36 children aged 6-12 years listened to a /ba/-/wa/ contrast in an oddball paradigm in which the standard stimulus had the ART and FRT cues of /ba/.

Are lexical tones musical? Native language's influence on neural response to pitch in different domains.

Language experience shapes musical and speech pitch processing. We investigated whether speaking a lexical tone language natively modulates neural processing of pitch in language and music as well as their correlation. We tested tone language (Mandarin Chinese), and non-tone language (Dutch) listeners in a passive oddball paradigm measuring mismatch negativity (MMN) for (i) Chinese lexical tones and (ii) three-note musical melodies with similar pitch contours.

Atypical cortical entrainment to speech in the right hemisphere underpins phonemic deficits in dyslexia.

Developmental dyslexia is a multifaceted disorder of learning primarily manifested by difficulties in reading, spelling, and phonological processing. Neural studies suggest that phonological difficulties may reflect impairments in fundamental cortical oscillatory mechanisms. Here we examine cortical mechanisms in children (6-12 years of age) with or without dyslexia (utilising both age- and reading-level-matched controls) using electroencephalography (EEG).

Effect of EEG Referencing Methods on Auditory Mismatch Negativity.

Auditory event-related potentials (ERPs) have consistently been used in the investigation of auditory and cognitive processing in the research and clinical laboratories. There is currently no consensus on the choice of appropriate reference for auditory ERPs. The most commonly used references in auditory ERP research are the mathematically linked-mastoids (LM) and average referencing (AVG).

When speaker identity is unavoidable: Neural processing of speaker identity cues in natural speech.

Speech sound acoustic properties vary largely across speakers and accents. When perceiving speech, adult listeners normally disregard non-linguistic variation caused by speaker or accent differences, in order to comprehend the linguistic message, e.g.

Neural processing of amplitude and formant rise time in dyslexia.

This study aimed to investigate how children with dyslexia weight amplitude rise time (ART) and formant rise time (FRT) cues in phonetic discrimination. Passive mismatch responses (MMR) were recorded for a/ba/-/wa/contrast in a multiple deviant odd-ball paradigm to identify the neural response to cue weighting in 17 children with dyslexia and 17 age-matched control children. The deviant stimuli had either partial or full ART or FRT cues.

Auditory ERP response to successive stimuli in infancy.

Background. Auditory Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) are useful for understanding early auditory development among infants, as it allows the collection of a relatively large amount of data in a short time. So far, studies that have investigated development in auditory ERPs in infancy have mainly used single sounds as stimuli.

Using event-related potentials to measure phrase boundary perception in English.

Background: The closure positive shift (CPS) event related potential (ERP) is commonly used as a neural measure of phrase boundary perception in speech. The present study investigated whether the CPS was elicited by acoustic cues at phrase boundaries in English. ERPs were recorded when participants listened passively to sentences with either early or late phrase boundaries.

Assessing spectral and temporal processing in children and adults using temporal modulation transfer function (TMTF), Iterated Ripple Noise (IRN) perception, and spectral ripple discrimination (SRD).

Background: There are many clinically available tests for the assessment of auditory processing skills in children and adults. However, there is limited data available on the maturational effects on the performance on these tests.

Purpose: The current study investigated maturational effects on auditory processing abilities using three psychophysical measures: temporal modulation transfer function (TMTF), iterated ripple noise (IRN) perception, and spectral ripple discrimination (SRD).

Effects of broadband noise on cortical evoked auditory responses at different loudness levels in young adults.

Young adults with no history of hearing concerns were tested to investigate their /da/-evoked cortical auditory evoked potentials (P1-N1-P2) recorded from 32 scalp electrodes in the presence and absence of noise at three different loudness levels (soft, comfortable, and loud), at a fixed signal-to-noise ratio (+3 dB). P1 peak latency significantly increased at soft and loud levels, and N1 and P2 latencies increased at all three levels in the presence of noise, compared with the quiet condition. P1 amplitude was significantly larger in quiet than in noise conditions at the loudest level.

Discrimination of stress in speech and music: a mismatch negativity (MMN) study.

The aim of this study was to determine if duration-related stress in speech and music is processed in a similar way in the brain. To this end, we tested 20 adults for their abstract mismatch negativity (MMN) event-related potentials to two duration-related stress patterns: stress on the first syllable or note (long-short), and stress on the second syllable or note (short-long). A significant MMN was elicited for both speech and music except for the short-long speech stimulus.