Vocal pitch discrimination in the motor system

D’Ausilio, Alessandro; Bufalari, Ilaria; Salmas, Paola; Busan, Pierpaolo; Fadiga, Luciano

doi:10.1016/j.bandl.2011.02.007

Cited by 30 publications

(24 citation statements)

References 58 publications

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“…This fact may explain why our results differ in part to those of Watkins et al (2003) and Murakami et al (2011) whose findings suggest that auditory-induced motor modulations related to speech listening are confined to the cortical representations of those muscles involved in articulation. Indeed, there is now a significant body of evidence to support the somatotopic arrangement of speech gesture perception (Fadiga et al, 2002; Roy et al, 2008; D’Ausilio et al, 2009, 2011; Möttönen and Watkins, 2009; Sato et al, 2010) but such findings do not necessarily rule out the non-specific motor activations in response to both speech and non-speech acoustic stimuli that have been documented using both TMS and other methods (Flöel et al, 2003; Alibiglou and Mackinnon, 2012; Fujioka et al, 2012). …”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Induction of plasticity in the human motor cortex by pairing an auditory stimulus with TMS

Sowman

Dueholm

Rasmussen

et al. 2014

Front. Hum. Neurosci.

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Acoustic stimuli can cause a transient increase in the excitability of the motor cortex. The current study leverages this phenomenon to develop a method for testing the integrity of auditorimotor integration and the capacity for auditorimotor plasticity. We demonstrate that appropriately timed transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) of the hand area, paired with auditorily mediated excitation of the motor cortex, induces an enhancement of motor cortex excitability that lasts beyond the time of stimulation. This result demonstrates for the first time that paired associative stimulation (PAS)-induced plasticity within the motor cortex is applicable with auditory stimuli. We propose that the method developed here might provide a useful tool for future studies that measure auditory-motor connectivity in communication disorders.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Induction of plasticity in the human motor cortex by pairing an auditory stimulus with TMS

Sowman

Dueholm

Rasmussen

et al. 2014

Front. Hum. Neurosci.

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“…For each morphing level, discrimination sensitivity (d-prime - d') and potential response biases (log ß) [76] were evaluated for two-alternative discrimination tasks [77]. Because of their normal distribution, one-sample t-tests were calculated for each group separately in order to analyze if d-prime was above chance level and if potential biases reached significance.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

More than Just Two Sexes: The Neural Correlates of Voice Gender Perception in Gender Dysphoria

et al. 2014

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Gender dysphoria (also known as “transsexualism”) is characterized as a discrepancy between anatomical sex and gender identity. Research points towards neurobiological influences. Due to the sexually dimorphic characteristics of the human voice, voice gender perception provides a biologically relevant function, e.g. in the context of mating selection. There is evidence for a better recognition of voices of the opposite sex and a differentiation of the sexes in its underlying functional cerebral correlates, namely the prefrontal and middle temporal areas. This fMRI study investigated the neural correlates of voice gender perception in 32 male-to-female gender dysphoric individuals (MtFs) compared to 20 non-gender dysphoric men and 19 non-gender dysphoric women. Participants indicated the sex of 240 voice stimuli modified in semitone steps in the direction to the other gender. Compared to men and women, MtFs showed differences in a neural network including the medial prefrontal gyrus, the insula, and the precuneus when responding to male vs. female voices. With increased voice morphing men recruited more prefrontal areas compared to women and MtFs, while MtFs revealed a pattern more similar to women. On a behavioral and neuronal level, our results support the feeling of MtFs reporting they cannot identify with their assigned sex.

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“…However, there is experimental evidence showing that the role of motor information becomes more essential in critical conditions (e.g., when speech is noisy; Castellini et al, 2011; D'Ausilio et al, 2011; Mitra et al, 2012) or not clearly articulated (as in dysarthria, Rudzicz, 2011). Future corpora with simultaneous recordings of audio and articulatory movements in diverse speaking styles (e.g., spontaneous conversational speech, Lombard speech) will need to take this fact into account.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Transcranial magnetic stimulation of the motor cortex induces a somatotopical facilitation of the discrimination of speech sounds (D'Ausilio et al, 2009, 2011). Analogous results have been replicated in several labs using different stimulation protocols and tasks (Meister et al, 2007; Möttönen and Watkins, 2009; Sato et al, 2009).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Modeling speech imitation and ecological learning of auditory-motor maps

Canevari¹,

Badino²,

D’Ausilio³

et al. 2013

Front. Psychol.

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Classical models of speech consider an antero-posterior distinction between perceptive and productive functions. However, the selective alteration of neural activity in speech motor centers, via transcranial magnetic stimulation, was shown to affect speech discrimination. On the automatic speech recognition (ASR) side, the recognition systems have classically relied solely on acoustic data, achieving rather good performance in optimal listening conditions. The main limitations of current ASR are mainly evident in the realistic use of such systems. These limitations can be partly reduced by using normalization strategies that minimize inter-speaker variability by either explicitly removing speakers' peculiarities or adapting different speakers to a reference model. In this paper we aim at modeling a motor-based imitation learning mechanism in ASR. We tested the utility of a speaker normalization strategy that uses motor representations of speech and compare it with strategies that ignore the motor domain. Specifically, we first trained a regressor through state-of-the-art machine learning techniques to build an auditory-motor mapping, in a sense mimicking a human learner that tries to reproduce utterances produced by other speakers. This auditory-motor mapping maps the speech acoustics of a speaker into the motor plans of a reference speaker. Since, during recognition, only speech acoustics are available, the mapping is necessary to “recover” motor information. Subsequently, in a phone classification task, we tested the system on either one of the speakers that was used during training or a new one. Results show that in both cases the motor-based speaker normalization strategy slightly but significantly outperforms all other strategies where only acoustics is taken into account.

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Vocal pitch discrimination in the motor system

Cited by 30 publications

References 58 publications

Induction of plasticity in the human motor cortex by pairing an auditory stimulus with TMS

Induction of plasticity in the human motor cortex by pairing an auditory stimulus with TMS

More than Just Two Sexes: The Neural Correlates of Voice Gender Perception in Gender Dysphoria

Modeling speech imitation and ecological learning of auditory-motor maps

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