The aim of this experiment was to examine the preattentive processing of syllables in 9-11-year-old children with dyslexia and matched controls using the Mismatch Negativity (MMN), an auditory Event-Related brain potential (ERP) related to preattentive discrimination. Children were presented with a sequence of syllables that included standards…

Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) perform worse than controls when listening to speech in a temporally modulated noise (Alcantara, Weisblatt, Moore, & Bolton, 2004; Groen et al., 2009). The current study examined whether this is due to poor auditory temporal-envelope processing. Temporal modulation transfer functions were measured in…

An event-related brain potentials (ERP) experiment was carried out to investigate how and when accentuation influences temporally selective attention and subsequent semantic processing during on-line spoken language comprehension, and how the effect of accentuation on attention allocation and semantic processing changed with the degree of…

The aim of this study was to investigate individual differences in the influence of lexical association on word recognition during auditory sentence processing. Lexical associations among individual words (e.g. salt and pepper) represent one type of semantic information that is available during the processing of words in context. We predicted that…

Environmental events produce many sensory cues for identifying the action that evoked the event, the agent that performed the action, and the object targeted by the action. The cues for identifying environmental events are usually distributed across multiple sensory systems. Thus, to understand how environmental events are recognized requires an…

We investigated whether the interpretation of auditory stimuli as speech or non-speech affects audiovisual (AV) speech integration at the neural level. Perceptually ambiguous sine-wave replicas (SWS) of natural speech were presented to listeners who were either in "speech mode" or "non-speech mode". At the behavioral level, incongruent lipread…

Wernicke's aphasia is a condition which results in severely disrupted language comprehension following a lesion to the left temporo-parietal region. A phonological analysis deficit has traditionally been held to be at the root of the comprehension impairment in Wernicke's aphasia, a view consistent with current functional neuroimaging which finds…

In an experimental paradigm adapted from Hari (1995), forty observers listened via headphones to 8 binaural clicks: 4 left-ear leading followed by 4 right-ear leading with either 38 or 140 ms interstimulus intervals (ISIs). Concurrently, they viewed either foveal or peripheral visual stimuli designed to activate either the parvocellular or…

Categorical perception (CP) is a mechanism whereby non-identical stimuli that have the same underlying meaning become invariantly represented in the brain. Through behavioral identification and discrimination tasks, CP has been demonstrated to occur broadly across the auditory modality, including in perception of speech (e.g. phonemes) and music…

To highlight relevant information in dialogues, both wh-question context and pitch accent in answers can be used, such that focused information gains more attention and is processed more elaborately. To evaluate the relative influence of context and pitch accent on the depth of semantic processing, we measured event-related potentials (ERPs) to…

In this study we examined asymmetric semantic activation patterns as people listened to conversations and narratives that promoted causal inferences. Based on the hypothesis that understanding the unique features of conversational input may benefit from or require a modified pattern of conceptual activation during conversation, we compared…

This study aimed to assess the effect of musical training in statistical learning of tone sequences using Magnetoencephalography (MEG). Specifically, MEG recordings were used to investigate the neural and functional correlates of the pre-attentive ability for detection of deviance, from a statistically learned tone sequence. The effect of…

Imitation in speech refers to the unintentional transfer of phonologically irrelevant acoustic-phonetic information of auditory input into speech motor output. Evidence for such imitation effects has been explained within the framework of episodic theories. However, it is largely unclear, which neural structures mediate speech imitation and how…

Among the large variety of attentional tasks that have been used to study sustained attention, the Continuous Performance Task (CPT) is perhaps the most widely used. Despite substantial differences in task characteristics and demands, all CPT paradigms have been referred to as measures of sustained attention. In the present study we introduce a…

The goal of this study was to examine the claim that amodal deficits in attentional shifting may be the source of reading acquisition disorders in phonological developmental dyslexia (sluggish attentional shifting, SAS, theory, Hari & Renvall, 2001). We investigated automatic attentional shifting in the auditory and visual modalities in 13…