Context and perceptual asymmetry effects on the mismatch negativity (MMNm) to speech sounds: an MEG study

In the field of neurobiology of language, neuroimaging studies are generally based on stimulation paradigms consisting of at least two different conditions. Depending on the desired evaluation, these conditions, in turn, have to contain dozens of items to achieve a good signal to noise ratio. Designing those paradigms can be very time-consuming. Subsequently, a group of participants is stimulated with the new paradigm, while brain activity is assessed, e.g. with EEG/MEG. The measured data are then pre-processed and finally contrasted according to the different stimulus conditions. In this way, only a limited number of analyses and hypothesis tests can be performed, while for alternative or further analyses, completely new paradigms usually need to be designed. This traditional approach is necessarily data-limited, and the cost-benefit ratio is therefore rather poor. In contrast, in computational linguistics analyses are based on text corpora, which allow a vast variety of hypotheses to be tested by repeatedly re-evaluating the data set. Furthermore, text corpora also allow exploratory data analysis in order to generate new hypotheses. By combining the two approaches, we here present a unified approach of continuous natural speech and MEG to generate a corpuslike database of speech-evoked neuronal activity.

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“…For this study, we restricted our analyses to sensor space, and did not perform source localization in analogy to other ERF studies [79][80][81].…”

Section: Magnetoencephalography and Data Processingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Analysis of continuous neuronal activity evoked by natural speech with computational corpus linguistics methods

Schilling

Tomasello

Henningsen-Schomers

et al. 2020

Preprint

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“…Our findings add to an existing body of research that has employed the MMN or other neural measures to assess asymmetric patterns in speech processing. Unlike the present study, much of the prior MMN work related to asymmetries was motivated and designed to assess theoretical perspectives on phonological processing, typically focusing on evaluating models that posit different feature-based approaches such as abstract/under-specification versus detailed/full specification views (Eulitz and Lahiri, 2004;Cornell et al, 2011Cornell et al, , 2013Scharinger et al, 2012;Hestvik and Durvasula., 2016;Hojlund et al, 2019). For example, Eulitz and Lahiri (2004) examined German adults' discrimination of several native vowel contrasts (i.e., /e/-/o/, /ø/-/o/, /e/-/ø/) in a passive oddball task, using event-related potentials.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Neurophysiological Correlates of Asymmetries in Vowel Perception: An English-French Cross-Linguistic Event-Related Potential Study

Polka

Molnar

Zhao

et al. 2021

Front. Hum. Neurosci.

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Behavioral studies examining vowel perception in infancy indicate that, for many vowel contrasts, the ease of discrimination changes depending on the order of stimulus presentation, regardless of the language from which the contrast is drawn and the ambient language that infants have experienced. By adulthood, linguistic experience has altered vowel perception; analogous asymmetries are observed for non−native contrasts but are mitigated for native contrasts. Although these directional effects are well documented behaviorally, the brain mechanisms underlying them are poorly understood. In the present study we begin to address this gap. We first review recent behavioral work which shows that vowel perception asymmetries derive from phonetic encoding strategies, rather than general auditory processes. Two existing theoretical models–the Natural Referent Vowel framework and the Native Language Magnet model–are invoked as a means of interpreting these findings. Then we present the results of a neurophysiological study which builds on this prior work. Using event-related brain potentials, we first measured and assessed the mismatch negativity response (MMN, a passive neurophysiological index of auditory change detection) in English and French native-speaking adults to synthetic vowels that either spanned two different phonetic categories (/y/vs./u/) or fell within the same category (/u/). Stimulus presentation was organized such that each vowel was presented as standard and as deviant in different blocks. The vowels were presented with a long (1,600-ms) inter-stimulus interval to restrict access to short-term memory traces and tap into a “phonetic mode” of processing. MMN analyses revealed weak asymmetry effects regardless of the (i) vowel contrast, (ii) language group, and (iii) MMN time window. Then, we conducted time-frequency analyses of the standard epochs for each vowel. In contrast to the MMN analysis, time-frequency analysis revealed significant differences in brain oscillations in the theta band (4–8 Hz), which have been linked to attention and processing efficiency. Collectively, these findings suggest that early-latency (pre-attentive) mismatch responses may not be a strong neurophysiological correlate of asymmetric behavioral vowel discrimination. Rather, asymmetries may reflect differences in neural processing efficiency for vowels with certain inherent acoustic-phonetic properties, as revealed by theta oscillatory activity.

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“…They observed a smaller MMN to the vowel contrast when the underspecified member of the pair served as the standard. Since this paper, several other studies have tested the viability of underspecification models and generally have found support (Cornell et al, 2011(Cornell et al, , 2013Scharinger et al, 2012;Hestvik and Durvasula, 2016;Cummings et al, 2017;Scharinger and Samuels, 2017;Højlund et al, 2019).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 87%

Neural Representation of the English Vowel Feature [High]: Evidence From /ε/ vs. /ɪ/

Shafer

2021

Front. Hum. Neurosci.

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Many studies have observed modulation of the amplitude of the neural index mismatch negativity (MMN) related to which member of a phoneme contrast [phoneme A, phoneme B] serves as the frequent (standard) and which serves as the infrequent (deviant) stimulus (i.e., AAAB vs. BBBA) in an oddball paradigm. Explanations for this amplitude modulation range from acoustic to linguistic factors. We tested whether exchanging the role of the mid vowel /ε/ vs. high vowel /ɪ/ of English modulated MMN amplitude and whether the pattern of modulation was compatible with an underspecification account, in which the underspecified height values are [−high] and [−low]. MMN was larger for /ε/ as the deviant, but only when compared across conditions to itself as the standard. For the within-condition comparison, MMN was larger to /ɪ/ deviant minus /ε/ standard than to the reverse. A condition order effect was also observed. MMN amplitude was smaller to the deviant stimulus if it had previously served as the standard. In addition, the amplitudes of late discriminative negativity (LDN) showed similar asymmetry. LDN was larger for deviant /ε/ than deviant /ɪ/ when compared to themselves as the standard. These findings were compatible with an underspecification account, but also with other accounts, such as the Natural Referent Vowel model and a prototype model; we also suggest that non-linguistic factors need to be carefully considered as additional sources of speech processing asymmetries.

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Context and perceptual asymmetry effects on the mismatch negativity (MMNm) to speech sounds: an MEG study

Abstract: Running head: "Perceptual asymmetry reflected by the MMNm to speech" Word count (including main text and figure/table captions): 9,086

Cited by 12 publications

References 103 publications

Analysis of continuous neuronal activity evoked by natural speech with computational corpus linguistics methods

Analysis of continuous neuronal activity evoked by natural speech with computational corpus linguistics methods

Neurophysiological Correlates of Asymmetries in Vowel Perception: An English-French Cross-Linguistic Event-Related Potential Study

Neural Representation of the English Vowel Feature [High]: Evidence From /ε/ vs. /ɪ/

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