Evidence of Altered Cortical Processing of Dynamic Lexical Tone Pitch Contour in Chinese Children with Autism.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Yu L
PROVIDER: S-EPMC8566691 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Nov
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Evidence of Altered Cortical Processing of Dynamic Lexical Tone Pitch Contour in Chinese Children with Autism.
Yu Luodi L Huang Dan D Wang Suiping S Wu Xueyuan X Chen Yang Y Zhang Yang Y
Neuroscience bulletin 20210719 11
Similar Datasets
Project description:In tonal languages such as Chinese, lexical tone with varying pitch contours serves as a key feature to provide contrast in word meaning. Similar to phoneme processing, behavioral studies have suggested that Chinese tone is categorically perceived. However, its underlying neural mechanism remains poorly understood. By conducting cortical surface recordings in surgical patients, we revealed a cooperative cortical network along with its dynamics responsible for this categorical perception. Based on an oddball paradigm, we found amplified neural dissimilarity between cross-category tone pairs, rather than between within-category tone pairs, over cortical sites covering both the ventral and dorsal streams of speech processing. The bilateral superior temporal gyrus (STG) and the middle temporal gyrus (MTG) exhibited increased response latencies and enlarged neural dissimilarity, suggesting a ventral hierarchy that gradually differentiates the acoustic features of lexical tones. In addition, the bilateral motor cortices were also found to be involved in categorical processing, interacting with both the STG and the MTG and exhibiting a response latency in between. Moreover, the motor cortex received enhanced Granger causal influence from the semantic hub, the anterior temporal lobe, in the right hemisphere. These unique data suggest that there exists a distributed cooperative cortical network supporting the categorical processing of lexical tone in tonal language speakers, not only encompassing a bilateral temporal hierarchy that is shared by categorical processing of phonemes but also involving intensive speech-motor interactions over the right hemisphere, which might be the unique machinery responsible for the reliable discrimination of tone identities.
| S-EPMC5699060 | biostudies-literature
Project description:The aim is to evaluate how language experience (Chinese, English) shapes processing of pitch contours as reflected in the amplitude of cortical pitch response components. Responses were elicited from three dynamic curvilinear nonspeech stimuli varying in pitch direction and location of peak acceleration: Mandarin lexical Tone 2 (rising) and Tone 4 (falling), and a flipped variant of Tone 2, Tone 2' (nonnative). At temporal sites (T7/T8), Chinese listeners' Na-Pb response amplitudes to Tones 2 and 4 were greater than those of English listeners in the right hemisphere only; a rightward asymmetry for Tones 2 and 4 was restricted to the Chinese group. In common to both Fz-to-linked T7/T8 and T7/T8 electrode sites, the stimulus pattern (Tones 2 and 4 > Tone 2') was found in the Chinese group only. As reflected by Pb-Nb at Fz, Chinese subjects' amplitudes were larger than those of English subjects in response to Tones 2 and 4, and Tones 2 and 4 were larger than Tone 2', whereas for English subjects, Tone 2 was larger than Tone 2' and Tone 4. At frontal electrode sites (F3/F4), regardless of component or hemisphere, Chinese subjects' responses were larger in amplitude than those of English subjects across stimuli. For either group, responses to Tones 2 and 4 were larger than Tone 2'. No hemispheric asymmetry was observed at the frontal electrode sites. These findings demonstrate that cortical pitch response components are differentially modulated by experience-dependent, temporally distinct but functionally overlapping, weighting of sensory and extrasensory effects on pitch processing of lexical tones in the right temporal lobe and, more broadly, are consistent with a distributed hierarchical predictive coding process.
| S-EPMC4461533 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Many children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are delayed in learning language. The mechanisms underlying these delays are not well understood but may involve differences in how children process language. In the current experiment, we compared how 3- to 4-year-old children with ASD (n = 58) and 2- to 3-year-old children who are typically developing (TD, n = 44) use phonological information to incrementally process speech. Children saw pictures of objects displayed on a screen and heard sentences labeling one of the objects (e.g., Find the ball). For some sentences, the determiner the contained coarticulatory information about the onset of the target word. For other sentences, the determiner the did not contain any coarticulatory information. Children were faster to fixate the target object for sentences with vs. without coarticulation. This effect of coarticulation was the same for children with ASD compared to their TD peers. When controlling for group differences in receptive language ability, the effect of coarticulation was stronger for children with ASD compared to their TD peers. These results suggest that phonological processing is an area of relative strength for children with ASD.
| S-EPMC8324542 | biostudies-literature
Project description:This study explores the difficulties in distinguishing different lexical tone contrasts at both sub-lexical and lexical levels for beginning and advanced Dutch learners of Mandarin, using a sequence-recall task and an auditory lexical decision task. In both tasks, the Tone 2-Tone 3 contrast is most prone to errors for both groups of learners. A significant improvement in the advanced group was found for this tone contrast in the sub-lexical sequence recall task, but not in the lexical decision task. This is taken as evidence that utilizing tones in on-line spoken word recognition is more complex and demanding for L2 learners than in a memory-based task. The results of the lexical decision task also revealed that advanced learners have developed a stronger sensitivity to Tone 1 compared to the other three tones, with Tone 4 showing the least sensitivity. These findings suggest different levels of robustness and distinctiveness for the representation of different lexical tones in L2 learners' lexicon and consequently different levels of proficiency in integrating tones for lexical processing. The observed patterns of difficulty are potentially related to the acoustic characteristics of different lexical tone contrasts as well as to the interference of the suprasegmental features of learner's native language (i.e., the tonal contrasts of Dutch intonation) on the acquisition of the Mandarin lexical tone contrasts.
| S-EPMC9207513 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is associated with widespread receptive language impairments, yet the neural mechanisms underlying these deficits are poorly understood. Neuroimaging has shown that processing of socially-relevant sounds, including speech and non-speech, is atypical in ASD. However, it is unclear how the presence of lexical-semantic meaning affects speech processing in ASD. Here, we recorded magnetoencephalography data from individuals with ASD (N = 22, ages 7-17, 4 females) and typically developing (TD) peers (N = 30, ages 7-17, 5 females) during unattended listening to meaningful auditory speech sentences and meaningless jabberwocky sentences. After adjusting for age, ASD individuals showed stronger responses to meaningless jabberwocky sentences than to meaningful speech sentences in the same left temporal and parietal language regions where TD individuals exhibited stronger responses to meaningful speech. Maturational trajectories of meaningful speech responses were atypical in temporal, but not parietal, regions in ASD. Temporal responses were associated with ASD severity, while parietal responses were associated with aberrant involuntary attentional shifting in ASD. Our findings suggest a receptive speech processing dysfunction in ASD, wherein unattended meaningful speech elicits abnormal engagement of the language system, while unattended meaningless speech, filtered out in TD individuals, engages the language system through involuntary attention capture.
| S-EPMC8500341 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Mandarin tone 3 sandhi is a phonological alternation in which the initial tone 3 (i.e., low tone) syllable changes to a tone 2 (i.e., rising tone) when followed by another tone 3. The present study used a cross-modal syllable-morpheme matching experiment to examine how native speakers process the sandhi sequences derived from verb reduplication and compounding, respectively. Embedded in a visually-presented sentential context, a disyllabic sequence containing a sandhi target was displayed simultaneously with a monosyllabic audio, either a tone 1 (i.e., high-level tone), tone 2 (i.e., rising tone) or tone 3 (i.e., low tone), and participants judged whether the audio syllable matched the visual morpheme. Results showed that the tone 3 sandhi was processed differently in the two constructions. The underlying tone and the surface tone were co-activated and competed with each other in sandhi compounds whereas predominant activation of the underlying tone, over the surface tone, was observed in reduplication. The processing of tone 3 sandhi offers support for distinctive morphological structures: a lexical compound is represented both as a whole-word unit and as a combination of two individual morphemes whereas a verb reduplication is represented and accessed as a monomorphemic unit in the mental lexicon.
| S-EPMC8427194 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Speech comprehension across languages depends on encoding the pitch variations in frequency-modulated (FM) sweeps at different timescales and frequency ranges. While timescale and spectral contour of FM sweeps play important roles in differentiating acoustic speech units, relatively little work has been done to understand the interaction between the two acoustic dimensions at early cortical processing. An auditory oddball paradigm was employed to examine the interaction of timescale and pitch contour at pre-attentive processing of FM sweeps. Event-related potentials to frequency sweeps that vary in linguistically relevant pitch contour (fundamental frequency F0 vs. first formant frequency F1) and timescale (local vs. global) in Mandarin Chinese were recorded. Mismatch negativities (MMNs) were elicited by all types of sweep deviants. For local timescale, FM sweeps with F0 contours yielded larger MMN amplitudes than F1 contours. A reversed MMN amplitude pattern was obtained with respect to F0/F1 contours for global timescale stimuli. An interhemispheric asymmetry of MMN topography was observed corresponding to local and global-timescale contours. Falling but not rising frequency difference waveforms sweep contours elicited right hemispheric dominance. Results showed that timescale and pitch contour interacts with each other in pre-attentive auditory processing of FM sweeps. Findings suggest that FM sweeps, a type of non-speech signal, is processed at an early stage with reference to its linguistic function. That the dynamic interaction between timescale and spectral pattern is processed during early cortical processing of non-speech frequency sweep signal may be critical to facilitate speech encoding at a later stage.
| S-EPMC8021897 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Voice pitch is an important information-bearing component of language that is subject to experience dependent plasticity at both early cortical and subcortical stages of processing. We have already demonstrated that pitch onset component (Na) of the cortical pitch response (CPR) is sensitive to flat pitch and its salience … CPR responses from Chinese listeners were elicited by three citation forms varying in pitch acceleration and duration. Results showed that the pitch onset component (Na) was invariant to changes in acceleration. In contrast, Na–Pb and Pb–Nb showed a systematic decrease in the interpeak latency and decrease in amplitude with increase in pitch acceleration that followed the time course of pitch change across the three stimuli. A strong correlation with pitch acceleration was observed for these two components only – a putative index of pitch-relevant neural activity associated with the more rapidly-changing portions of the pitch contour. Pc–Nc marks unambiguously the stimulus offset … and their functional roles as related to sensory and cognitive properties of the stimulus. [Corrected]
| S-EPMC4169671 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Pitch patterns, such as melodies, consist of two levels of structure: a global level, comprising the pattern of ups and downs, or contour; and a local level, comprising the precise intervals that make up this contour. An influential neuropsychological model suggests that these two levels of processing are hierarchically linked, with processing of the global structure occurring within the right hemisphere in advance of local processing within the left. However, the predictions of this model and its anatomical basis have not been tested in neurologically normal individuals. The present study used fMRI and required participants to listen to consecutive pitch sequences while performing a same/different one-back task. Sequences, when different, either preserved (local) or violated (global) the contour of the sequence preceding them. When the activations for the local and global conditions were contrasted directly, additional activation was seen for local processing in right planum temporale and posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS). The presence of additional activation for local over global processing supports the hierarchical view that the global structure of a pitch sequence acts as a "framework" on which the local detail is subsequently hung. However, the lateralisation of activation seen in the present study, with global processing occurring in left pSTS and local processing occurring bilaterally, differed from that predicted by the neuroanatomical model. A re-examination of the individual lesion data on which the neuroanatomical model is based revealed that the lesion data equally well support the laterality scheme suggested by our data. While the present study supports the hierarchical view of local and global processing, there is an evident need for further research, both in patients and neurologically normal individuals, before an understanding of the functional lateralisation of local and global processing can be considered established.
| S-EPMC2198945 | biostudies-literature
Project description:BackgroundHearing loss is associated with cognitive decline and increased risk for Alzheimer's disease, but the basis of this association is not understood.ObjectiveTo determine whether hearing impairment is associated with advanced brain aging or altered microstructure in areas involved with auditory and cognitive processing.Methods130 participants, (mean 76.4±7.3 years; 65% women) of the Rancho Bernardo Study of Healthy Aging had a screening audiogram in 2003-2005 and brain magnetic resonance imaging in 2014-2016. Hearing ability was defined as the average pure tone threshold (PTA) at 500, 1000, 2000, and 4000 Hz in the better-hearing ear. Brain-predicted age difference (Brain-pad) was calculated as the difference between brain-predicted age based on a validated structural imaging biomarker of brain age, and chronological age. Regional diffusion metrics in temporal and frontal cortex regions were obtained from diffusion-weighted MRIs. Linear regression analyses adjusted for age, gender, education, and health-related measures.ResultsPTAs were not associated with brain-PAD (β= 0.09; 95% CI: -0.084 to 0.243; p = 0.34). PTAs were associated with reduced restricted diffusion and increased free water diffusion primarily in right hemisphere temporal and frontal areas (restricted diffusion: βs = -0.21 to -0.30; 95% CIs from -0.48 to -0.02; ps < 0.03; free water: βs = 0.18 to 0.26; 95% CIs 0.01 to 0.438; ps < 0.04).ConclusionsHearing impairment is not associated with advanced brain aging but is associated with differences in brain regions involved with auditory processing and attentional control. It is thus possible that increased dementia risk associated with hearing impairment arises, in part, from compensatory brain changes that may decrease resilience.
| S-EPMC10793660 | biostudies-literature