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Hernández-Pérez H, Mikiel-Hunter J, McAlpine D, Dhar S, Boothalingam S, Monaghan JJM, McMahon CM. Understanding degraded speech leads to perceptual gating of a brainstem reflex in human listeners. PLoS Biol 2021; 19:e3001439. [PMID: 34669696 PMCID: PMC8559948 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.3001439] [Citation(s) in RCA: 7] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 03/16/2021] [Revised: 11/01/2021] [Accepted: 10/07/2021] [Indexed: 11/19/2022] Open
Abstract
The ability to navigate "cocktail party" situations by focusing on sounds of interest over irrelevant, background sounds is often considered in terms of cortical mechanisms. However, subcortical circuits such as the pathway underlying the medial olivocochlear (MOC) reflex modulate the activity of the inner ear itself, supporting the extraction of salient features from auditory scene prior to any cortical processing. To understand the contribution of auditory subcortical nuclei and the cochlea in complex listening tasks, we made physiological recordings along the auditory pathway while listeners engaged in detecting non(sense) words in lists of words. Both naturally spoken and intrinsically noisy, vocoded speech-filtering that mimics processing by a cochlear implant (CI)-significantly activated the MOC reflex, but this was not the case for speech in background noise, which more engaged midbrain and cortical resources. A model of the initial stages of auditory processing reproduced specific effects of each form of speech degradation, providing a rationale for goal-directed gating of the MOC reflex based on enhancing the representation of the energy envelope of the acoustic waveform. Our data reveal the coexistence of 2 strategies in the auditory system that may facilitate speech understanding in situations where the signal is either intrinsically degraded or masked by extrinsic acoustic energy. Whereas intrinsically degraded streams recruit the MOC reflex to improve representation of speech cues peripherally, extrinsically masked streams rely more on higher auditory centres to denoise signals.
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Affiliation(s)
- Heivet Hernández-Pérez
- Department of Linguistics, The Australian Hearing Hub, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia
| | - Jason Mikiel-Hunter
- Department of Linguistics, The Australian Hearing Hub, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia
| | - David McAlpine
- Department of Linguistics, The Australian Hearing Hub, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia
| | - Sumitrajit Dhar
- Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, United States of America
| | - Sriram Boothalingam
- University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin, United States of America
| | - Jessica J. M. Monaghan
- Department of Linguistics, The Australian Hearing Hub, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia
- National Acoustic Laboratories, Sydney, Australia
| | - Catherine M. McMahon
- Department of Linguistics, The Australian Hearing Hub, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia
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An Electrophysiological Abstractness Effect for Metaphorical Meaning Making. eNeuro 2020; 7:ENEURO.0052-20.2020. [PMID: 32817197 PMCID: PMC7559308 DOI: 10.1523/eneuro.0052-20.2020] [Citation(s) in RCA: 5] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 02/09/2020] [Revised: 06/13/2020] [Accepted: 07/13/2020] [Indexed: 11/21/2022] Open
Abstract
Neuroimaging studies show that metaphors activate sensorimotor areas. These findings were interpreted as metaphors contributing to conceptual thought by mapping concrete, somatosensory information onto abstract ideas. But is sensorimotor information a necessary constituent of figurative meaning? The present study employed event-related potentials (ERPs) in a divided visual field paradigm with healthy adults to explore the role of sensorimotor feature processing in the comprehension of novel metaphors via the electrophysiological concreteness effect. Participants read French, novel adjective-noun expressions that were either metaphorical (“fat sentence”) or literal (“fat hip”). While literal expressions evoked a typical concreteness effect, an enhanced frontal negativity during right hemisphere (RH) as opposed to left hemisphere (LH) presentation, metaphors showed no such sign of sensorimotor feature processing. Relative to literals, they evoked a sustained frontal negativity during LH presentation and similar amplitudes during RH presentation, but both of these effects were the greater the more abstract the metaphors were. It is the first time such an electrophysiological abstractness effect is reported, just the opposite of a concreteness effect. It is particularly noteworthy that ERPs evoked by metaphors were not contingent on figurativeness, novelty, meaningfulness, imageability, emotional valence, or arousal, only on abstractness. When compared with similarly novel literal expressions, metaphors did not evoke a typical N400 and did not activate the RH either. The findings shed new light on the neurocognitive machinery of figurative meaning construction, pervasive in everyday communication. Contrary to embodied cognition, the conceptual system might be organized around abstract representations and not sensorimotor information, even for lush, metaphorical language.
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Ortiz T, Ortiz-Teran L, Turrero A, Poch-Broto J, de Erausquin GA. A N400 ERP Study in letter recognition after passive tactile stimulation training in blind children and sighted controls. Restor Neurol Neurosci 2020; 37:197-206. [PMID: 31227674 DOI: 10.3233/rnn-180838] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/15/2022]
Abstract
BACKGROUND We previously demonstrated that using a sensory substitution device (SSD) for one week, tactile stimulation results in faster activation of lateral occipital complex in blind children than in seeing controls. OBJECTIVE We used long-term haptic tactile stimulation training with an SSD to test if it results in stable cross-modal reassignment of visual pathways after six months, to provide high level processing of tactile semantic content. METHODS We enrolled 12 blind and 12 sighted children. The SSD transforms images to a stimulation matrix in contact with the dominant hand. Subjects underwent twice-daily training sessions, 5 days/week for six months. Children were asked to describe line orientation, name letters, and read words. ERP sessions were performed at baseline and 6 months to analyze the N400 ERP component and reaction times (RT). N400 sources were estimated with Low Resolution Electromagnetic Tomography (LORETA). SPM8 was used to make population-level inferences. RESULTS We found no group differences in RTs, accuracy of identifications, N400 latencies or distributions with the line task at 1 week or at 6 months. RTs on the letter recognition task were also similar. After 6 months, behavioral training increased accurate letter identification in both seeing and blind children (Chi 2 = 11906.934, p = 0.000), but the increase was larger in blind children (Chi 2 = 8.272, p = 0.004). Behavioral training shifted peak N400 amplitude to left occipital and bilateral parietal cortices in blind children, but to left precentral and postcentral and bilateral occipital cortices in sighted controls. CONCLUSIONS Blind children learn to recognize SSD-delivered letters better than seeing controls and had greater N400 amplitude in the occipital region. To the best of our knowledge, our results provide the first published example of standard letter recognition (not Braille) by children with blindness using a tactile delivery system.
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Affiliation(s)
- Tomas Ortiz
- Department of Psychiatry, Faculty of Medicine Universidad Complutense, Madrid, Spain
| | - Laura Ortiz-Teran
- Department of Radiology, Gordon Center for Medical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital Harvard University, Boston, USA
| | - Agustin Turrero
- Department of Biostatistics, Faculty of Medicine Universidad Complutense, Madrid, Spain
| | - Joaquin Poch-Broto
- Department of Ear, Nose and Throat, Hospital Clínico Universitario San Carlos, Madrid, Spain
| | - Gabriel A de Erausquin
- Department of Psychiatry and Neurology, Institute of Neuroscience, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley School of Medicine, Harlingen, USA
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Hussey EK, Christianson K, Treiman DM, Smith KA, Steinmetz PN. Single neuron recordings of bilinguals performing in a continuous recognition memory task. PLoS One 2017; 12:e0181850. [PMID: 28832639 PMCID: PMC5568109 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0181850] [Citation(s) in RCA: 2] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 08/04/2016] [Accepted: 07/07/2017] [Indexed: 01/09/2023] Open
Abstract
We report the results of a bilingual continuous recognition memory task during which single- and multi-neuron activity was recorded in human subjects with intracranial microwire implants. Subjects (n = 5) were right-handed Spanish-English bilinguals who were undergoing evaluation prior to surgery for severe epilepsy. Subjects were presented with Spanish and English words and the task was to determine whether any given word had been seen earlier in the testing session, irrespective of the language in which it had appeared. Recordings in the left and right hippocampus revealed notable laterality, whereby both Spanish and English items that had been seen previously in the other language (switch trials) triggered increased neural firing in the left hippocampus. Items that had been seen previously in the same language (repeat trials) triggered increased neural firings in the right hippocampus. These results are consistent with theories that propose roles of both the left- and right-hemisphere in real-time linguistic processing. Importantly, this experiment presents the first instance of intracranial recordings in bilinguals performing a task with switching demands.
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Affiliation(s)
- Erika K. Hussey
- Cognitive Science Team, U.S. Army Natick Soldier Research, Development and Engineering Center, Natick, Massachusetts, United States of America
- Center for Applied Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Medford, Massachusetts, United States of America
- Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, University of Illinois, Urbana, Illinois, United States of America
| | - Kiel Christianson
- Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, University of Illinois, Urbana, Illinois, United States of America
- Department of Educational Psychology, University of Illinois, Champaign, Illinois, United States of America
| | - David M. Treiman
- Department of Neurology, Barrow Neurological Institute, Phoenix, Arizona, United States of America
| | - Kris A. Smith
- Department of Neurosurgery, Barrow Neurological Institute, Phoenix, Arizona, United States of America
| | - Peter N. Steinmetz
- Department of Neurology, Barrow Neurological Institute, Phoenix, Arizona, United States of America
- Department of Neurosurgery, Barrow Neurological Institute, Phoenix, Arizona, United States of America
- Nakamoto Brain Research Institute, Tempe, Arizona, United States of America
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Lateralization of language function in epilepsy patients: A high-density scalp-derived event-related potentials (ERP) study. Clin Neurophysiol 2017; 128:472-479. [DOI: 10.1016/j.clinph.2016.12.025] [Citation(s) in RCA: 9] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 09/08/2016] [Revised: 12/01/2016] [Accepted: 12/21/2016] [Indexed: 11/20/2022]
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DeLong KA, Kutas M. Hemispheric differences and similarities in comprehending more and less predictable sentences. Neuropsychologia 2016; 91:380-393. [PMID: 27609127 DOI: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2016.09.004] [Citation(s) in RCA: 10] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 03/15/2016] [Revised: 08/29/2016] [Accepted: 09/04/2016] [Indexed: 11/16/2022]
Abstract
With a growing literature demonstrating the predictive nature of language processing, the current study examines contributions of the brain's two hemispheres in processing more and less probable sentence continuations. Specifically, we use the ERP method in conjunction with the visual half-field paradigm to test for hemispheric utilization of sentential constraint to (pre-)activate lexical information and resolve meaning. Taking advantage of the N400's semantic sensitivities, we find support for both hemispheres exhibiting remarkably similar involvement, across a range of message level constraint, in meaning construction. In contrast, hemispheric ERP patterns at a later processing stage differed, as reflected in an anterior post-N400 positivity (PNP) to constraint violations for words presented to the right but not left visual field (indicating a left hemisphere processing bias). We show here that hemispheric involvement in predictive sentence comprehension varies at different stages of word processing, and we examine these patterns' (in)consistencies with findings from the hemi-field and central visual presentation literature.
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Affiliation(s)
- Katherine A DeLong
- Department of Cognitive Science, University of California, San Diego, USA.
| | - Marta Kutas
- Department of Cognitive Science, University of California, San Diego, USA; Center for Research in Language, University of California, San Diego, USA; Department of Neurosciences, University of California, San Diego, USA; Kavli Institute for Brain and Mind, University of California, San Diego, USA
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Zeev-Wolf M, Faust M, Levkovitz Y, Harpaz Y, Goldstein A. Magnetoencephalographic evidence of early right hemisphere overactivation during metaphor comprehension in schizophrenia. Psychophysiology 2015; 52:770-81. [PMID: 25603893 DOI: 10.1111/psyp.12408] [Citation(s) in RCA: 18] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 08/31/2014] [Accepted: 12/15/2014] [Indexed: 11/27/2022]
Abstract
Whereas language processing in neurotypical brains is left lateralized, individuals with schizophrenia (SZ) display a bilateral or reversed pattern of lateralization. We used MEG to investigate the implications of this atypicality on fine (left hemisphere) versus coarse (right hemisphere) semantic processing. Ten SZ and 14 controls were presented with fine (conventional metaphor, literal, and unrelated expressions) and coarse (novel metaphor) linguistic stimuli. Results showed greater activation of the right hemisphere for novel metaphors and greater bilateral activation for unrelated expressions at the M170 window in SZ. Moreover, at the M350, SZ showed reduced bilateral activation. We conclude that SZ are overreliant on early-stage coarse semantic processing. As a result, they jump too quickly to remote conclusions, with limited control over the meanings they form. This may explain one of the core symptoms of the disorder-loose associations.
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Affiliation(s)
- Maor Zeev-Wolf
- Department of Psychology, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel.,Gonda Brain Research Center, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel
| | - Miriam Faust
- Department of Psychology, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel.,Gonda Brain Research Center, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel
| | - Yechiel Levkovitz
- Emotion-Cognition Research Center, The Shalvata Mental Health Care Center, Hod-Hasharon, Israel.,Sackler Faculty of Medicine, Tel-Aviv University, Tel-Aviv, Israel
| | - Yuval Harpaz
- Gonda Brain Research Center, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel
| | - Abraham Goldstein
- Department of Psychology, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel.,Gonda Brain Research Center, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel
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Luka BJ, Van Petten C. Prospective and retrospective semantic processing: prediction, time, and relationship strength in event-related potentials. BRAIN AND LANGUAGE 2014; 135:115-129. [PMID: 25025836 DOI: 10.1016/j.bandl.2014.06.001] [Citation(s) in RCA: 13] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 08/06/2013] [Revised: 05/28/2014] [Accepted: 06/02/2014] [Indexed: 06/03/2023]
Abstract
Semantic context effects have variously been attributed to prospective processing - predictions about upcoming words - or to retrospective appreciation of relationships after reading both context and target. In two experiments, we altered the core variable distinguishing prospective from retrospective processing, namely time. Word pairs varying in strength of relationship were presented sequentially, to allow time for anticipation of the second word, or simultaneously. For both sorts of presentation, the amplitude of the N400 component of the event-related potential was graded from Unrelated to Moderate/Weak to Strong associates. Strong associates showed a temporal advantage over weaker associates - an earlier context effect - only during sequential presentation. Spatial distributions of the N400 context effects also differed for simultaneous versus sequential presentation.
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Kröger S, Rutter B, Hill H, Windmann S, Hermann C, Abraham A. An ERP study of passive creative conceptual expansion using a modified alternate uses task. Brain Res 2013; 1527:189-98. [DOI: 10.1016/j.brainres.2013.07.007] [Citation(s) in RCA: 17] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 12/07/2012] [Revised: 06/26/2013] [Accepted: 07/04/2013] [Indexed: 11/29/2022]
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