Flexible Representation of Speech

Summary

The overarching goal of this exploratory research is to understand the dynamic and flexible nature of speech processing in the human supratemporal plane. The temporal lobe has long been established as a region of interest in the speech perception and processing literature because it contains the auditory cortex. More recently, research has localized the supratemporal plane as an area that exhibits response specificity to acoustic properties of complex auditory signals like speech. The supratemporal plane, comprised of Heschl's gyrus, the planum polare, and the planum temporale, is capable of the rapid spectrotemporal analysis required to map acoustic information to linguistic representation. Neural activity in this area, however, is rarely studied directly because it is difficult to access with non-invasive measures like scalp electroencephalography (EEG). Capitalizing on the unique opportunity to access these areas via routine clinical stereoelectroencephalography (sEEG) in a patient population, this study seeks to understand how cortical responses reflect the diagnosticity of two acoustic-phonetic dimensions of interest and how responses rapidly and flexibly adapt to changes in listening demands. Examining how neural response to voice onset time (VOT) and fundamental frequency (F0) modulates as a function of perceptual weight carried in signaling phoneme categories, and identifying how changes in listening context shift perceptual weight, will provide invaluable data that indicates how speech processing flexibly adapts to short-term acoustic patterns.

Conditions

• Epilepsy

Interventions

BEHAVIORAL

Dimension-Based Statistical Learning

Each participant will complete self-paced blocks of stimuli that will first establish a baseline for neural activity and behavioral responses with clear speech, and will then record responses for experimentally manipulated blocks to introduce 1) speech-in-noise and 2) a Canonical-Reverse block to model an "accent." Auditory stimuli will be adjusted to a comfortable level for each participant as determined by a calibration process completed by the participant. Each block involves listening to sound via earphones and making a categorical decision between initial consonants (/b/ or /p/) by tapping a button to indicate the word heard by the participant.

Sponsors & Collaborators

• National Institutes of Health (NIH)

  collaborator NIH

• Carnegie Mellon University

  collaborator OTHER

• National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD)

  collaborator NIH

• University of Pittsburgh

  lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

• Taylor J Abel, MD · University of Pittsburgh

Study Design

Allocation

NA

Purpose

BASIC_SCIENCE

Masking

NONE

Model

SINGLE_GROUP

Eligibility

Min Age

15 Years

Max Age

25 Years

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

No

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2022-05-02

Primary Completion

2024-07-01

Completion

2025-04-10

Countries

• United States

Study Locations