We tested whether congenital amusics, who exhibit pitch perception deficits, nevertheless adjust the pitch of their voice in response to a sudden pitch shift applied to vocal feedback. Nine amusics and matched controls imitated their own previously-recorded speech or singing, while the online feedback they received was shifted mid-utterance by 25…

A longstanding issue in psychology is the relationship between how we perceive the world and how we act upon it. Pitch deafness provides an interesting opportunity to test for the independence of perception and production abilities in the speech domain. We tested eight amusics and eight matched controls for their ability to perceive pitch shifts…

Neural control of rising and falling tones in Mandarin people who stutter (PWS) was examined by comparing with that which occurs in fluent speakers [Howell, Jiang, Peng, and Lu (2012). Neural control of fundamental frequency rise and fall in Mandarin tones. "Brain and Language, 121"(1), 35-46]. Nine PWS and nine controls were scanned. Functional…

Visual speech inputs can enhance auditory speech information, particularly in noisy or degraded conditions. The natural statistics of audiovisual speech highlight the temporal correspondence between visual and auditory prosody, with lip, jaw, cheek and head movements conveying information about the speech envelope. Low-frequency spatial and…

Mechanisms of cortical reorganization underlying the enhancement of speech processing have been poorly investigated. In the present study, we addressed changes in functional and effective connectivity induced in subjects who learned to deliberately increase activation in the right inferior frontal gyrus (rIFG), and improved their ability to…

Speech production can be broadly separated into two distinct components: Phonation and Articulation. These two aspects require the efficient control of several phono-articulatory effectors. Speech is indeed generated by the vibration of the vocal-folds in the larynx (F0) followed by "filtering" by articulators, to select certain resonant…

This study investigated global versus local pitch pattern perception in children with dyslexia aged between 8 and 11 years. Children listened to two consecutive 4-tone pitch sequences while performing a same/different task. On the different trials, sequences either preserved the contour (local condition) or they violated the contour (global…

The present study investigated whether the neural correlates for auditory feedback control of vocal pitch can be shaped by tone language experience. Event-related potentials (P2/N1) were recorded from adult native speakers of Mandarin and Cantonese who heard their voice auditory feedback shifted in pitch by -50, -100, -200, or -500 cents when they…

Dysarthria following surgical resection of childhood posterior fossa tumour (PFT) is most commonly documented in a select group of participants with mutism in the acute recovery phase, thus limiting knowledge of post-operative prognosis for this population of children as a whole. Here we report on the speech characteristics of 13 cases seen…

Pitch processing is lateralized to the right hemisphere; linguistic pitch is further mediated by left cortical areas. This experiment investigates whether ear asymmetries vary in brainstem representation of pitch depending on linguistic status. Brainstem frequency-following responses (FFRs) were elicited by monaural stimulation of the left and…

We assessed the relationship between brain structure and function in 10 individuals with specific language impairment (SLI), compared to six unaffected siblings, and 16 unrelated control participants with typical language. Voxel-based morphometry indicated that grey matter in the SLI group, relative to controls, was increased in the left inferior…

This study presents evidence suggesting that electrophysiological responses to language-related auditory stimuli recorded at 46 weeks postconceptional age (PCA) are associated with language development, particularly in infants with periventricular leukomalacia (PVL). In order to investigate this hypothesis, electrophysiological responses to a set…

Brief tonal stimuli and spoken sentences were utilized to examine whether adolescents (aged 14;3-18;1) with specific language impairments (SLI) exhibit atypical neural activity for rapid auditory processing of non-linguistic stimuli and linguistic processing of verb-agreement and semantic constraints. Further, we examined whether the behavioral…

Historically, the brainstem has been neglected as a part of the brain involved in language processing. We review recent evidence of language-dependent effects in pitch processing based on comparisons of native vs. nonnative speakers of a tonal language from electrophysiological recordings in the auditory brainstem. We argue that there is enhancing…

The current study on German investigates Event-Related brain Potentials (ERPs) for the perception of sentences with intonations which are infrequent (i.e. vocatives) or inadequate in daily conversation. These ERPs are compared to the processing correlates for sentences in which the syntax-to-prosody relations are congruent and used frequently…