Auditory perception and syntactic cognition: brain activity‐based decoding within and across subjects

Abstract

The present magnetoencephalography study investigated whether the brain states of early syntactic and auditory-perceptual processes can be decoded from single-trial recordings with a multivariate pattern classification approach. In particular, it was investigated whether the early neural activation patterns in response to rule violations in basic auditory perception and in high cognitive processes (syntax) reflect a functional organization that largely generalizes across individuals or is subject-specific. On this account, subjects were auditorily presented with correct sentences, syntactically incorrect sentences, correct sentences including an interaural time difference change, and sentences containing both violations. For the analysis, brain state decoding was carried out within and across subjects with three pairwise classifications. Neural patterns elicited by each of the violation sentences were separately classified with the patterns elicited by the correct sentences. The results revealed the highest decoding accuracies over temporal cortex areas for all three classification types. Importantly, both the magnitude and the spatial distribution of decoding accuracies for the early neural patterns were very similar for within-subject and across-subject decoding. At the same time, across-subject decoding suggested a hemispheric bias, with the most consistent patterns in the left hemisphere. Thus, the present data show that not only auditory-perceptual processing brain states but also cognitive brain states of syntactic rule processing can be decoded from single-trial brain activations. Moreover, the findings indicate that the neural patterns in response to syntactic cognition and auditory perception reflect a functional organization that is highly consistent across individuals.

Decoding Speech Perception by Native and Non-Native Speakers Using Single-Trial Electrophysiological Data

“…The present cross-participant analyses provide additional support for this view. They are also in line with previous cross-participant classification analyses presented in [33], [35], which showed either equivalent or improved classification performance when using cross-participant data sets as compared to within-participant datasets. As was the case with the results presented in [33], the overall improvement in performance here may be due to the increased amount of training data available in the cross-participant analysis.…”

“…Within-participant single-trial classification rates were comparable with the average rates reported in [35]. The results of that study also showed a graded pattern of results depending on which manipulation (auditory space, syntax or both) was present in the experimental stimulus.…”

“…With regard to speech perception, it has been shown that the brain activity underlying the perception of different vowels and different speaking voices can be decoded from single-trial fMRI data [24]. A recent study by Herrmann and colleagues demonstrated that both unexpected changes in low-level acoustic features as well as syntactic-rule violations can be also decoded using MEG data, with cross-participant analyses showing a high-degree of consistency in both the spatial distribution of features as well as in overall performance relative to individual analyses [35].…”

Decoding of single-trial auditory mismatch responses for online perceptual monitoring and neurofeedback

“…This suggests that activity in and around this frequency band will provide discriminative information for the present classification analysis. Other studies classifying MMN data (Herrmann et al, 2012) and auditory evoked responses to music (Schaefer et al, 2011) have also made use of similar filter settings during preprocessing, indicating that band-pass filtering in the 0.5–13 Hz range might improve decoding performance for auditory brain responses.…”

Improving the reading skills of Jordanian students with auditory discrimination problems

“…It is wrong to put pressure on them because it makes them feel that they have failed and are unable to perceive and discriminate, as they are in need of special means to help them with their learning (Filippini, et al 2013). Perceptual processes are considered prerequisites to learning to read, because developmental learning difficulties represented in the synthesis of sounds (auditory perception) are one of the main reasons that prevent a child from learning to read (Herrmann, 2012; Al-Bashtawy et al, 2014).…”