Presentation
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Mu (μ) activity during vowel quantity perception with rhythmic priming
Poster A53 in Poster Session A, Thursday, October 6, 10:15 am - 12:00 pm EDT, Millennium Hall
David Morris1; 1University of Copenhagen
This paper investigates how regular and irregular rhythmic priming affects the brain processing of speech contrasts when they are maintained in memory prior to response. An electroencephalography (EEG) experiment was performed where participants (n = 15) discriminated between syllables in both quiet and noise (-5 dB SNR). Stimuli were two syllable pairs which were either the same or they differed in duration by 45 ms. A vowel quantity contrasts are relevant as they are generally distinctive, salient in noise and encountered in everyday speech. Priming was realized with pink noise pulses that were distributed in the 2.5 s priming window to form a rhythm for the regular primes. The beat of these rhythms was aligned with the second member of the stimulus pair, which was either same or different as the first. Irregular primes included the same number of rhythmic elements, but these were pseudo-randomly distributed within the priming window providing no such beat. Behavioral performance in the discrimination task was high for both priming conditions, and the effect of noise background and priming was not significant. In the neural data, mu (μ) activity derived from EEG data, based on the spectral content of candidate components revealed time-frequency differences in alpha-μ. This occurred during a maintenance period and was in the right hemisphere for primes and the left for syllable pairs. Differences in the spectral content of μ-components were also found for the syllable pairs and the noise background. These results suggest that rhythmic priming can have a bearing on the neural circuitry that is drawn on to process speech. This will be discussed in the context of rhythmic priming, perceptual-phonological effects and continued work on μ-activity that probes the linkage between speech perception and production.
Topic Areas: Prosody, Writing and Spelling