Temporal pitch matching with bilateral cochlear implants.

Interaural pitch matching is a common task used with bilateral cochlear implant (CI) users, although studies measuring this have largely focused on place-based pitch matches. Temporal-based pitch also plays an important role in CI users' perception, but interaural temporal-based pitch matching has not been well characterized for CI users. To investigate this, bilateral CI users were asked to match amplitude modulation frequencies of stimulation across ears. Comparisons were made to previous place-based pitch matching data that were collected using similar procedures. The results indicate that temporal-based pitch matching is particularly sensitive to the choice of reference ear.

Cortical specialization associated with native speech category acquisition in early infancy.

This study investigates neural processes in infant speech processing, with a focus on left frontal brain regions and hemispheric lateralization in Mandarin-speaking infants' acquisition of native tonal categories. We tested 2- to 6-month-old Mandarin learners to explore age-related improvements in tone discrimination, the role of inferior frontal regions in abstract speech category representation, and left hemisphere lateralization during tone processing. Using a block design, we presented four Mandarin tones via [ta] and measured oxygenated hemoglobin concentration with functional near-infrared spectroscopy. Results showed age-related improvements in tone discrimination, greater involvement of frontal regions in older infants indicating abstract tonal representation development and increased bilateral activation mirroring native adult Mandarin speakers. These findings contribute to our broader understanding of the relationship between native speech acquisition and infant brain development during the critical period of early language learning.

Frequency effects can modulate the neural correlates of prosodic processing in Mandarin.

In tonal languages, tone perception involves the processing of both acoustic and phonological information conveyed by tonal signals. In Mandarin, in addition to four canonical full tones, there exists a group of weak syllables known as neutral tones. This study aims to investigate the impact of lexical frequency effects and prosodic information associated with neutral tones on the auditory representation of Mandarin compounds. We initially selected disyllabic compounds as targets, manipulating their lexical frequencies and prosodic structures. Subsequently, these target compounds were embedded into selected sentences and auditorily presented to native speakers. During the experiments, participants engaged in lexical decision tasks while their event-related potentials were recorded. The results showed that the auditory lexical representation of disyllabic compounds was modulated by lexical frequency effects. Rare compounds and compounds with rare first constituents elicited larger N400 effects compared to frequent compounds. Furthermore, neutral tones were found to play a role in the processing, resulting in larger N400 effects. Our findings showed significantly increased amplitudes of the N400 component, suggesting that the processing of rare compounds and compounds with neutral tones may require more cognitive resources. Additionally, we observed an interaction effect between lexical frequency and neutral tones, indicating that they could serve as determining cues in the auditory processing of disyllabic compounds.

Investigating Perception to Production Transfer in Children With Cochlear Implants: A High Variability Phonetic Training Study.

PURPOSE: This study builds upon an established effective training method to investigate the advantages of high variability phonetic identification training for enhancing lexical tone perception and production in Mandarin-speaking pediatric cochlear implant (CI) recipients, who typically face ongoing challenges in these areas. METHOD: Thirty-two Mandarin-speaking children with CIs were quasirandomly assigned into the training group (TG) and the control group (CG). The 16 TG participants received five sessions of high variability phonetic training (HVPT) within a period of 3 weeks. The CG participants did not receive the training. Perception and production of Mandarin tones were administered before (pretest) and immediately after (posttest) the completion of HVPT via lexical tone recognition task and picture naming task. Both groups participated in the identical pretest and posttest with the same time frame between the two test sessions. RESULTS: TG showed significant improvement from pretest to posttest in identifying Mandarin tones for both trained and untrained speech stimuli. Moreover, perceptual learning of HVPT significantly facilitated trainees' production of T1 and T2 as rated by a cohort of 10 Mandarin-speaking adults with normal hearing, which was corroborated by acoustic analyses revealing improved fundamental frequency (F0) median for T1 and T2 production and enlarged F0 movement for T2 production. In contrast, TG children's production of T3 and T4 showed nonsignificant changes across two test sessions. Meanwhile, CG did not exhibit significant changes in either perception or production. CONCLUSIONS: The results suggest a limited and inconsistent transfer of perceptual learning to lexical tone production in children with CIs, which challenges the notion of a robust transfer and highlights the complexity of the interaction between perceptual training and production outcomes. Further research on individual differences with a longitudinal design is needed to optimize the training protocol or tailor interventions to better meet the diverse needs of learners.

Mandarin-Speaking Amusics' Online Recognition of Tone and Intonation.

PURPOSE: Congenital amusia is a neurogenetic disorder of musical pitch processing. Its linguistic consequences have been examined separately for speech intonations and lexical tones. However, in a tonal language such as Chinese, the processing of intonations and lexical tones interacts with each other during online speech perception. Whether and how the musical pitch disorder might affect linguistic pitch processing during online speech perception remains unknown. METHOD: We investigated this question with intonation (question vs. statement) and lexical tone (rising Tone 2 vs. falling Tone 4) identification tasks using the same set of sentences, comparing behavioral and event-related potential measurements between Mandarin-speaking amusics and matched controls. We specifically focused on the amusics without behavioral lexical tone deficits (the majority, i.e., pure amusics). RESULTS: Results showed that, despite relative to normal performance when tested in word lexical tone test, pure amusics demonstrated inferior recognition than controls during sentence tone and intonation identification. Compared to controls, pure amusics had larger N400 amplitudes in question stimuli during tone task and smaller P600 amplitudes in intonation task. CONCLUSION: These data indicate that musical pitch disorder affects both tone and intonation processing during sentence processing even for pure amusics, whose lexical tone processing was intact when tested with words.

Effects of absolute pitch on brain activation and functional connectivity during hearing-in-noise perception.

Hearing-in-noise (HIN) ability is crucial in speech and music communication. Recent evidence suggests that absolute pitch (AP), the ability to identify isolated musical notes, is associated with HIN benefits. A theoretical account postulates a link between AP ability and neural network indices of segregation. However, how AP ability modulates the brain activation and functional connectivity underlying HIN perception remains unclear. Here we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to contrast brain responses among a sample (n = 45) comprising 15 AP musicians, 15 non-AP musicians, and 15 non-musicians in perceiving Mandarin speech and melody targets under varying signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs: No-Noise, 0, -9 dB). Results reveal that AP musicians exhibited increased activation in auditory and superior frontal regions across both HIN domains (music and speech), irrespective of noise levels. Notably, substantially higher sensorimotor activation was found in AP musicians when the target was music compared to speech. Furthermore, we examined AP effects on neural connectivity using psychophysiological interaction analysis with the auditory cortex as the seed region. AP musicians showed decreased functional connectivity with the sensorimotor and middle frontal gyrus compared to non-AP musicians. Crucially, AP differentially affected connectivity with parietal and frontal brain regions depending on the HIN domain being music or speech. These findings suggest that AP plays a critical role in HIN perception, manifested by increased activation and functional independence between auditory and sensorimotor regions for perceiving music and speech streams.

Weighting of cues to categorization of song versus speech in tone-language and non-tone-language speakers.

One of the most important auditory categorization tasks a listener faces is determining a sound's domain, a process which is a prerequisite for successful within-domain categorization tasks such as recognizing different speech sounds or musical tones. Speech and song are universal in human cultures: how do listeners categorize a sequence of words as belonging to one or the other of these domains? There is growing interest in the acoustic cues that distinguish speech and song, but it remains unclear whether there are cross-cultural differences in the evidence upon which listeners rely when making this fundamental perceptual categorization. Here we use the speech-to-song illusion, in which some spoken phrases perceptually transform into song when repeated, to investigate cues to this domain-level categorization in native speakers of tone languages (Mandarin and Cantonese speakers residing in the United Kingdom and China) and in native speakers of a non-tone language (English). We find that native tone-language and non-tone-language listeners largely agree on which spoken phrases sound like song after repetition, and we also find that the strength of this transformation is not significantly different across language backgrounds or countries of residence. Furthermore, we find a striking similarity in the cues upon which listeners rely when perceiving word sequences as singing versus speech, including small pitch intervals, flat within-syllable pitch contours, and steady beats. These findings support the view that there are certain widespread cross-cultural similarities in the mechanisms by which listeners judge if a word sequence is spoken or sung.

Modelling Mandarin tone perception-production link through critical perceptual cues.

Theoretical accounts posit a close link between speech perception and production, but empirical findings on this relationship are mixed. To explain this apparent contradiction, a proposed view is that a perception-production relationship should be established through the use of critical perceptual cues. This study examines this view by using Mandarin tones as a test case because the perceptual cues for Mandarin tones consist of perceptually critical pitch direction and noncritical pitch height cues. The defining features of critical and noncritical perceptual cues and the perception-production relationship of each cue for each tone were investigated. The perceptual stimuli in the perception experiment were created by varying one critical and one noncritical perceptual cue orthogonally. The cues for tones produced by the same group of native Mandarin participants were measured. This study found that the critical status of perceptual cues primarily influenced within-category and between-category perception for nearly all tones. Using cross-domain bidirectional statistical modelling, a perception-production link was found for the critical perceptual cue only. A stronger link was obtained when within-category and between-category perception data were included in the models as compared to using between-category perception data alone, suggesting a phonetically and phonologically driven perception-production relationship.

Tonal interference in word learning? A comparison of Cantonese and French.

Most languages of the world use lexical tones to contrast words. Thus, understanding how individuals process tones when learning new words is fundamental for a better understanding of the mechanisms underlying word learning. The current study asked how tonal information is integrated during word learning. We investigated whether variability in tonal information during learning can interfere with the learning of new words and whether this is language and age dependent. Cantonese- and French-learning 30-month-olds (N = 97) and Cantonese- and French-speaking adults (N = 50) were tested with an eye-tracking task on their ability to learn phonetically different pairs of novel words in two learning conditions: a 1-tone condition in which each object was named with a single label and a 3-tone condition in which each object was named with three different labels varying in tone. We predicted learning in all groups in the 1-tone condition. For the 3-tone condition, because tones are part of the phonological system of Cantonese but not of French, we expected the Cantonese groups to either fail (toddlers) or show lower performance than in the 1-tone condition (adults), whereas the French groups might show less sensitivity to this manipulation. The results show that all participants learned in the 1-tone condition and were sensitive to tone variation to some extent. Learning in the 3-tone condition was impeded in both groups of toddlers. We argue that tonal interference in word learning likely comes from the phonological level in the Cantonese groups and from the acoustic level in the French groups.

Effect of musical expertise on the perception of duration and pitch in language: A cross-linguistic study.

This study adopts a cross-linguistic perspective and investigates how musical expertise affects the perception of duration and pitch in language. Native speakers of Chinese (N = 44) and Estonian (N = 46), each group subdivided into musicians and non-musicians, participated in a mismatch negativity (MMN) experiment where they passively listened to both Chinese and Estonian stimuli, followed by a behavioral experiment where they attentively discriminated the stimuli in the non-native language (i.e., Chinese to Estonian participants and Estonian to Chinese participants). In both experiments, stimuli of duration change, pitch change, and duration plus pitch change were discriminated. We found higher behavioral sensitivity among Chinese musicians than non-musicians in perceiving the duration change in Estonian and higher behavioral sensitivity among Estonian musicians than non-musicians in perceiving all types of changes in Chinese, but no corresponding effect was found in the MMN results, which suggests a more salient effect of musical expertise on foreign language processing when attention is required. Secondly, Chinese musicians did not outperform non-musicians in attentively discriminating the pitch-related stimuli in Estonian, suggesting that musical expertise can be overridden by tonal language experience when perceiving foreign linguistic pitch, especially when an attentive discrimination task is administered. Thirdly, we found larger MMN among Chinese and Estonian musicians than their non-musician counterparts in perceiving the largest deviant (i.e., duration plus pitch) in their native language. Taken together, our results demonstrate a positive effect of musical expertise on language processing.

Stimulus-responsive and task-dependent activations in occipital regions during pitch perception by early blind listeners.

Although it has been established that cross-modal activations occur in the occipital cortex during auditory processing among congenitally and early blind listeners, it remains uncertain whether these activations in various occipital regions reflect sensory analysis of specific sound properties, non-perceptual cognitive operations associated with active tasks, or the interplay between sensory analysis and cognitive operations. This fMRI study aimed to investigate cross-modal responses in occipital regions, specifically V5/MT and V1, during passive and active pitch perception by early blind individuals compared to sighted individuals. The data showed that V5/MT was responsive to pitch during passive perception, and its activations increased with task complexity. By contrast, widespread occipital regions, including V1, were only recruited during two active perception tasks, and their activations were also modulated by task complexity. These fMRI results from blind individuals suggest that while V5/MT activations are both stimulus-responsive and task-modulated, activations in other occipital regions, including V1, are dependent on the task, indicating similarities and differences between various visual areas during auditory processing.

Encoding of melody in the human auditory cortex.

Melody is a core component of music in which discrete pitches are serially arranged to convey emotion and meaning. Perception varies along several pitch-based dimensions: (i) the absolute pitch of notes, (ii) the difference in pitch between successive notes, and (iii) the statistical expectation of each note given prior context. How the brain represents these dimensions and whether their encoding is specialized for music remains unknown. We recorded high-density neurophysiological activity directly from the human auditory cortex while participants listened to Western musical phrases. Pitch, pitch-change, and expectation were selectively encoded at different cortical sites, indicating a spatial map for representing distinct melodic dimensions. The same participants listened to spoken English, and we compared responses to music and speech. Cortical sites selective for music encoded expectation, while sites that encoded pitch and pitch-change in music used the same neural code to represent equivalent properties of speech. Findings reveal how the perception of melody recruits both music-specific and general-purpose sound representations.

Perception of Specific Musical Attributes in Dependence of the Insertion Depth of Cochlear Implant Electrodes Using the Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Amusia.

HYPOTHESIS: The insertion angle of the electrode array has an influence on the perception of different musical features. BACKGROUND: A deeper insertion of the electrodes is associated with a greater coverage of the cochlea with possible stimulus locations. This could lead to an improved or extended perception of pitches and pitch changes as well as to a better perception of contours in musical pieces. METHODS: A Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Amusia test battery was conducted with a collective of 19 cochlear implant (CI) users and 9 normal-hearing subjects. For the CI users, the insertion angles of the intracochlear electrode arrays were calculated using Otoplan software. RESULTS: Compared with normal-hearing users, CI users performed worse in the detection of melodic features of music. CI users performed better with temporal features than with melodic features. An influence of the insertion depth of the electrodes on the results of the Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Amusia could be proven neither for Cochlear nor for MED-EL CI users. CONCLUSION: Deeper insertion of electrode arrays may only better approximate the spatial-frequency map. Alone, it does not have an effect on better detection and identification of pitch and tonality and, consequently, better perception of musical attributes. Anatomy-based calculation of electrode locations and matching to characteristic frequencies will be sought in subsequent studies.

Neural encoding of musical expectations in a non-human primate.

The appreciation of music is a universal trait of humankind.1,2,3 Evidence supporting this notion includes the ubiquity of music across cultures4,5,6,7 and the natural predisposition toward music that humans display early in development.8,9,10 Are we musical animals because of species-specific predispositions? This question cannot be answered by relying on cross-cultural or developmental studies alone, as these cannot rule out enculturation.11 Instead, it calls for cross-species experiments testing whether homologous neural mechanisms underlying music perception are present in non-human primates. We present music to two rhesus monkeys, reared without musical exposure, while recording electroencephalography (EEG) and pupillometry. Monkeys exhibit higher engagement and neural encoding of expectations based on the previously seeded musical context when passively listening to real music as opposed to shuffled controls. We then compare human and monkey neural responses to the same stimuli and find a species-dependent contribution of two fundamental musical features-pitch and timing12-in generating expectations: while timing- and pitch-based expectations13 are similarly weighted in humans, monkeys rely on timing rather than pitch. Together, these results shed light on the phylogeny of music perception. They highlight monkeys' capacity for processing temporal structures beyond plain acoustic processing, and they identify a species-dependent contribution of time- and pitch-related features to the neural encoding of musical expectations.

Pitch Variation Skills in Cantonese Speakers With Apraxia of Speech After Stroke: Preliminary Findings of Acoustic Analyses.

PURPOSE: Literature on apraxia of speech (AOS) in Chinese speakers is sparse compared to the English literature. This study aims to examine the pitch variation skills of Cantonese adults with AOS poststroke in terms of perceptual tone accuracy, acoustic fundamental frequency (fo) changes, and repetition durations on items with different syllable structures, lexical status, and tone syllables in various positions in a sequencing context. METHOD: Six Cantonese adults with AOS poststroke (AOS group), six adults without AOS poststroke (nAOS group), and six healthy controls (HC group) performed the tone sequencing task (TST), which was adapted from oral diadochokinetic tasks, with three different tone syllables. Tone accuracy, fo values across 10 time points, and acoustic repetition durations were compared within and between the groups. RESULTS: The AOS group produced significantly lower tone accuracy and different fo changes on the three Cantonese tone syllables compared with the control groups and significantly longer repetition durations than the HC group. The AOS group showed more difficulty with the tone syllables with the consonant-vowel structure, while a priming effect was observed on the T2 (high-rising) syllables with lexical meanings. A unique lowering of fo in the final syllable of the trisyllabic items was observed only in the AOS group. CONCLUSIONS: The AOS group showed degraded pitch variation skills. The effects of the three linguistic elements were discussed. Future investigations are called for to adapt the TST in other tonal languages to determine if degraded pitch variation skills are present in other tonal language speakers with AOS.

Recognition of Speech With Dynamic Pitch Manipulation in Noise: Effects of Manipulation Methods.

PURPOSE: Dynamic pitch, which is defined as the variation in fundamental frequency in speech, is one of the acoustic cues that affect speech recognition in noise. Built on the evidence that a symmetrical manipulation of dynamic pitch led to poorer speech recognition, the present study examined the effect of an asymmetrical manipulation method on speech recognition in noise by younger and older adults. METHOD: Speech recognition accuracy in noise was measured from younger adults with normal hearing in Experiment 1, and speech reception threshold (in dB SNR) from older adults with normal hearing to mild-moderate hearing loss in Experiment 2. The dynamic pitch contours of the speech stimuli were manipulated using both symmetrical and asymmetrical methods. RESULTS: Younger adults recognized speech better in noise with asymmetrical than symmetrical manipulation, and with weakened than strengthened dynamic pitch. A substantial amount of variability was observed in a group of older listeners. This variability was predominately predicted by the listeners' age but not hearing thresholds or their ability to perceive dynamic pitch in fluctuating noise. CONCLUSIONS: The asymmetrical manipulation of dynamic pitch had a less negative effect than the symmetrical manipulation. This effect also interacted with pitch-change direction. These findings suggest the influence of perceptual naturalness on speech recognition with signal modification. Directions for future research are also discussed.

Music Perception in Bone-Anchored Hearing Implant Users.

OBJECTIVE: Music is a highly complex acoustic stimulus in both spectral and temporal contents. Accurate representation and delivery of high-fidelity information are essential for music perception. However, it is unclear how well bone-anchored hearing implants (BAHIs) transmit music. The study objective is to establish music perception performance baselines for BAHI users and normal hearing (NH) listeners and compare outcomes between the cohorts. METHODS: A case-controlled, cross-sectional study was conducted among 18 BAHI users and 11 NH controls. Music perception was assessed via performance on seven major musical element tasks: pitch discrimination, melodic contour identification, rhythmic clocking, basic tempo discrimination, timbre identification, polyphonic pitch detection, and harmonic chord discrimination. RESULTS: BAHI users performed comparably well on all music perception tasks with their device compared with the unilateral condition with their better-hearing ear. BAHI performance was not statistically significantly different from NH listeners' performance. BAHI users performed just as well, if not better than NH listeners when using their control contralateral ear; there was no significant difference between the two groups except for the rhythmic timing (BAHI non-implanted ear 69% [95% CI: 62%-75%], NH 56% [95% CI: 49%-63%], p = 0.02), and basic tempo tasks (BAHI non-implanted ear 80% [95% CI: 65%-95%]; NH 75% [95% CI: 68%-82%, p = 0.03]). CONCLUSIONS: This study represents the first comprehensive study of basic music perception performance in BAHI users. Our results demonstrate that BAHI users perform as well with their implanted ear as with their contralateral better-hearing ear and NH controls in the major elements of music perception. LEVEL OF EVIDENCE: 3 Laryngoscope, 134:1381-1387, 2024.

Salient sounds distort time perception and production.

The auditory world is often cacophonous, with some sounds capturing attention and distracting us from our goals. Despite the universality of this experience, many questions remain about how and why sound captures attention, how rapidly behavior is disrupted, and how long this interference lasts. Here, we use a novel measure of behavioral disruption to test predictions made by models of auditory salience. Models predict that goal-directed behavior is disrupted immediately after points in time that feature a high degree of spectrotemporal change. We find that behavioral disruption is precisely time-locked to the onset of distracting sound events: Participants who tap to a metronome temporarily increase their tapping speed 750 ms after the onset of distractors. Moreover, this response is greater for more salient sounds (larger amplitude) and sound changes (greater pitch shift). We find that the time course of behavioral disruption is highly similar after acoustically disparate sound events: Both sound onsets and pitch shifts of continuous background sounds speed responses at 750 ms, with these effects dying out by 1,750 ms. These temporal distortions can be observed using only data from the first trial across participants. A potential mechanism underlying these results is that arousal increases after distracting sound events, leading to an expansion of time perception, and causing participants to misjudge when their next movement should begin.

Altered binaural hearing in pre-ataxic and ataxic mutation carriers of spinocerebellar ataxia type 3.

Brainstem degeneration is a prominent feature of spinocerebellar ataxia type 3 (SCA3), involving structures that execute binaural synchronization with microsecond precision. As a consequence, auditory processing may deteriorate during the course of disease. We tested whether the binaural "Huggins pitch" effect is suitable to study the temporal precision of brainstem functioning in SCA3 mutation carriers. We expected that they would have difficulties perceiving Huggins pitch at high frequencies, and that they would show attenuated neuromagnetic responses to Huggins pitch. The upper limit of Huggins pitch perception was psychoacoustically determined in 18 pre-ataxic and ataxic SCA3 mutation carriers and in 18 age-matched healthy controls. Moreover, the cortical N100 response following Huggins pitch onset was acquired by means of magnetoencephalography (MEG). MEG recordings were analyzed using dipole source modeling and comprised a monaural pitch condition and a no-pitch condition with simple binaural correlation changes. Compared with age-matched controls, ataxic but not pre-ataxic SCA3 mutation carriers had significantly lower frequency limits up to which Huggins pitch could be heard. Listeners with lower frequency limits also showed diminished MEG responses to Huggins pitch, but not in the two control conditions. Huggins pitch is a promising tool to assess brainstem functioning in ataxic SCA3 patients. Future studies should refine the psychophysiological setup to capture possible performance decrements also in pre-ataxic mutation carriers. Longitudinal observations will be needed to prove the potential of the assessment of Huggins pitch as a biomarker to track brainstem functioning during the disease course in SCA3.

Musical experience is linked to enhanced dimension-selective attention to pitch and increased primary weighting during suprasegmental categorization.

Speech perception requires the integration of evidence from acoustic cues across multiple dimensions. Individuals differ in their cue weighting strategies, that is, the weight they assign to different dimensions during speech categorization. In two experiments, we investigate musical training as one potential predictor of individual differences in prosodic cue weighting strategies. Attentional theories of speech categorization suggest that prior experience with the task-relevance of a particular dimension leads that dimension to attract attention. Experiment 1 tested whether musicians and nonmusicians differed in their ability to selectively attend to pitch and loudness in speech. Compared to nonmusicians, musicians showed enhanced dimension-selective attention to pitch but not loudness. Experiment 2 tested the hypothesis that musicians would show greater pitch weighting during prosodic categorization due to prior experience with the task-relevance of pitch cues in music. Listeners categorized phrases that varied in the extent to which pitch and duration signaled the location of linguistic focus and phrase boundaries. During linguistic focus categorization, musicians upweighted pitch compared to nonmusicians. During phrase boundary categorization, musicians upweighted duration relative to nonmusicians. These results suggest that musical experience is linked with domain-general enhancements in the ability to selectively attend to certain acoustic dimensions in speech. As a result, musicians may place greater perceptual weight on a single primary dimension during prosodic categorization, while nonmusicians may be more likely to choose a perceptual strategy that integrates across multiple dimensions. These findings support attentional theories of cue weighting, which suggest attention influences listeners' perceptual weighting of acoustic dimensions during categorization. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).