Editorial : Cognitive hearing science: Investigating the relationship between selective attention and brain activity

publishedVersionNon peer reviewe

Subliminal Semantic Priming in Speech

Numerous studies have reported subliminal repetition and semantic priming in the visual modality. We transferred this paradigm to the auditory modality. Prime awareness was manipulated by a reduction of sound intensity level. Uncategorized prime words (according to a post-test) were followed by semantically related, unrelated, or repeated target words (presented without intensity reduction) and participants performed a lexical decision task (LDT). Participants with slower reaction times in the LDT showed semantic priming (faster reaction times for semantically related compared to unrelated targets) and negative repetition priming (slower reaction times for repeated compared to semantically related targets). This is the first report of semantic priming in the auditory modality without conscious categorization of the prime

Exploration of non-conscious mechanisms involved in speech perception: Evidence from behavioral and electroencephalographic studies

Although a lot of information is available from our environment at every moment, only a small part gives rise to a conscious percept. It is then legitimate to wonder which mechanisms are involved in the perception phenomenon. On the basis of which processes will a sensory stimulation be perceived consciously? What happens to the stimulations that are not consciously perceived? The work presented in this thesis aims to bring some elements of response to these two questions in the auditory modality. Through different behavioral and electroencephalographic studies, we suggest that knowledge could have a top-down facilitatory influence on high-level as well as on low-level (like detection) processing of complex auditory stimulations. The stimulations we have some knowledge about (phonologic or semantic) are more easily detected than the stimulations that contain neither phonologic nor semantic information. We also show that the activation of the knowledge influences the perception of subsequent stimulations, even when the context is not perceived consciously. This is evidenced by a subliminal semantic priming effect and by modifications of the neural oscillations in the beta frequency band associated with lexical processing of stimulations that were not consciously categorized. Hence, auditory perception can be considered as the product of the continuous interaction between the context set by the environment and the knowledge one has about specific stimuli. Such an interaction would lead listeners to preferentially perceive what they already know.Tandis que de nombreuses informations sont disponibles dans notre environnement à chaque instant, toutes ne donnent pas lieu à une perception consciente. Il est alors légitime de se demander quels mécanismes entrent en jeu dans le phénomène de perception. Sur la base de quels processus une stimulation sensorielle sera-t-elle perçue de façon consciente ? Que deviennent les stimulations qui ne sont pas perçues consciemment ? Ce présent travail de thèse vise à apporter des éléments de réponse à ces deux questions dans la modalité auditive. À travers plusieurs études utilisant des approches comportementales mais aussi électroencéphalographiques, nous suggérons que les connaissances pourraient exercer une influence top-down facilitant les hauts comme les bas niveaux de traitement (comme la détection) des stimulations auditives complexes. Les stimulations pour lesquelles nous avons des connaissances (phonologiques et sémantiques) sont mieux détectées que les stimulations ne contenant ni caractéristique phonologique ni caractéristique sémantique. Nous montrons également que l'activation des connaissances influence la perception des stimulations ultérieures, et ce, même lorsque le contexte n'est pas perçu consciemment. En effet nous avons pu mettre en évidence un effet d'amorçage sémantique subliminal et nous avons observé des modifications neuronales oscillatoires dans la bande de fréquence bêta concomitante au traitement lexical de stimulations non catégorisées consciemment. L'ensemble des perceptions auditives ne serait alors que le produit d'une interaction permanente entre le contexte environnemental et les connaissances, ce qui nous conduirait à percevoir préférentiellement ce que nous connaissons déjà

Learning to learn to expand freedom in choices

Learning is related to knowledge that is shared between teacher and students. Whatever the use of traditional or modern teaching-learning methods, the students learn: they have access to new information and can therefore acquire or modify knowledge stored in memory. The goal of this opinion paper is to present what we know about the consequences of this internal change and how this could affect the students' choices. Recent works concerning the influence of knowledge stored in long-term memory (LTM) on the perception of the environment highlight that acquired knowledge could directly and automatically influence our perception of the events in the environment. Indeed, perception is therefore based on acquired knowledge: basically, we perceive what we already know. It is now of the utmost importance to ask how teaching-learning activities chosen by teachers or universities influence the knowledge acquisition and what the consequences of learning are for students' choices. - See more at: http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00780/full#sthash.NINCvegB.dpu

Exploration des mécanismes non conscients de la perception de la parole : approches comportementales et électroencéphalographiques

Although a lot of information is available from our environment at every moment, only a small part gives rise to a conscious percept. It is then legitimate to wonder which mechanisms are involved in the perception phenomenon. On the basis of which processes will a sensory stimulation be perceived consciously? What happens to the stimulations that are not consciously perceived? The work presented in this thesis aims to bring some elements of response to these two questions in the auditory modality. Through different behavioral and electroencephalographic studies, we suggest that knowledge could have a top-down facilitatory influence on high-level as well as on low-level (like detection) processing of complex auditory stimulations. The stimulations we have some knowledge about (phonologic or semantic) are more easily detected than the stimulations that contain neither phonologic nor semantic information. We also show that the activation of the knowledge influences the perception of subsequent stimulations, even when the context is not perceived consciously. This is evidenced by a subliminal semantic priming effect and by modifications of the neural oscillations in the beta frequency band associated with lexical processing of stimulations that were not consciously categorized. Hence, auditory perception can be considered as the product of the continuous interaction between the context set by the environment and the knowledge one has about specific stimuli. Such an interaction would lead listeners to preferentially perceive what they already know.Tandis que de nombreuses informations sont disponibles dans notre environnement à chaque instant, toutes ne donnent pas lieu à une perception consciente. Il est alors légitime de se demander quels mécanismes entrent en jeu dans le phénomène de perception. Sur la base de quels processus une stimulation sensorielle sera-t-elle perçue de façon consciente ? Que deviennent les stimulations qui ne sont pas perçues consciemment ? Ce présent travail de thèse vise à apporter des éléments de réponse à ces deux questions dans la modalité auditive. À travers plusieurs études utilisant des approches comportementales mais aussi électroencéphalographiques, nous suggérons que les connaissances pourraient exercer une influence top-down facilitant les hauts comme les bas niveaux de traitement (comme la détection) des stimulations auditives complexes. Les stimulations pour lesquelles nous avons des connaissances (phonologiques et sémantiques) sont mieux détectées que les stimulations ne contenant ni caractéristique phonologique ni caractéristique sémantique. Nous montrons également que l'activation des connaissances influence la perception des stimulations ultérieures, et ce, même lorsque le contexte n'est pas perçu consciemment. En effet nous avons pu mettre en évidence un effet d'amorçage sémantique subliminal et nous avons observé des modifications neuronales oscillatoires dans la bande de fréquence bêta concomitante au traitement lexical de stimulations non catégorisées consciemment. L'ensemble des perceptions auditives ne serait alors que le produit d'une interaction permanente entre le contexte environnemental et les connaissances, ce qui nous conduirait à percevoir préférentiellement ce que nous connaissons déjà

Exploration of non-conscious mechanisms involved in speech perception: Evidence from behavioral and electroencephalographic studies

Although a lot of information is available from our environment at every moment, only a small part gives rise to a conscious percept. It is then legitimate to wonder which mechanisms are involved in the perception phenomenon. On the basis of which processes will a sensory stimulation be perceived consciously? What happens to the stimulations that are not consciously perceived? The work presented in this thesis aims to bring some elements of response to these two questions in the auditory modality. Through different behavioral and electroencephalographic studies, we suggest that knowledge could have a top-down facilitatory influence on high-level as well as on low-level (like detection) processing of complex auditory stimulations. The stimulations we have some knowledge about (phonologic or semantic) are more easily detected than the stimulations that contain neither phonologic nor semantic information. We also show that the activation of the knowledge influences the perception of subsequent stimulations, even when the context is not perceived consciously. This is evidenced by a subliminal semantic priming effect and by modifications of the neural oscillations in the beta frequency band associated with lexical processing of stimulations that were not consciously categorized. Hence, auditory perception can be considered as the product of the continuous interaction between the context set by the environment and the knowledge one has about specific stimuli. Such an interaction would lead listeners to preferentially perceive what they already know.Tandis que de nombreuses informations sont disponibles dans notre environnement à chaque instant, toutes ne donnent pas lieu à une perception consciente. Il est alors légitime de se demander quels mécanismes entrent en jeu dans le phénomène de perception. Sur la base de quels processus une stimulation sensorielle sera-t-elle perçue de façon consciente ? Que deviennent les stimulations qui ne sont pas perçues consciemment ? Ce présent travail de thèse vise à apporter des éléments de réponse à ces deux questions dans la modalité auditive. À travers plusieurs études utilisant des approches comportementales mais aussi électroencéphalographiques, nous suggérons que les connaissances pourraient exercer une influence top-down facilitant les hauts comme les bas niveaux de traitement (comme la détection) des stimulations auditives complexes. Les stimulations pour lesquelles nous avons des connaissances (phonologiques et sémantiques) sont mieux détectées que les stimulations ne contenant ni caractéristique phonologique ni caractéristique sémantique. Nous montrons également que l'activation des connaissances influence la perception des stimulations ultérieures, et ce, même lorsque le contexte n'est pas perçu consciemment. En effet nous avons pu mettre en évidence un effet d'amorçage sémantique subliminal et nous avons observé des modifications neuronales oscillatoires dans la bande de fréquence bêta concomitante au traitement lexical de stimulations non catégorisées consciemment. L'ensemble des perceptions auditives ne serait alors que le produit d'une interaction permanente entre le contexte environnemental et les connaissances, ce qui nous conduirait à percevoir préférentiellement ce que nous connaissons déjà

Editorial: The Role of Working Memory and Executive Function in Communication under Adverse Conditions

n/aFunding Agencies|Swedish Research Council</p

The interplay of phonological and semantic knowledge during perception of degraded speech

The perceptual clarity of speech depends not only on acoustic quality of the sound, but also on linguistic support. In a set of three experiments, we investigated the interplay of phonological and semantic knowledge during speech perception in persons with normal (NH) and impaired hearing (IH). In three experiments, participants listened to grammatically correct spoken Swedish sentences at different sound quality levels (clear or degraded by noise vocoding). The sentences were more or less coherent and each spoken word (matching prime) or consonant strings (non-matching prime) was visually presented 200 ms beforehand. Analysis of variance in rated clarity showed significant interactions between coherence and prime type: a benefit of coherence with and without matching primes for NH but only with matching primes for IH was observed, although three-way interactions including sound quality levels somewhat modified this picture. Preliminary fMRI results from NH suggest that processing of semantic coherence in the absence of matching primes is supported by right middle temporal gyrus. These findings suggest that, when no phonological information is available, NH mobilize long-term semantic representations to successfully utilize the semantic information in spoken sentences that are moderately degraded. Future work should investigate what prevents IH from doing the same

Hearing impairment and perceived clarity of predictable speech

Objectives: The precision of stimulus-driven information is less critical for comprehension when accurate knowledge-based predictions of the upcoming stimulus can be generated. A recent study in listeners without hearing impairment (HI) has shown that form- and meaning-based predictability independently and cumulatively enhance perceived clarity of degraded speech. In the present study, we investigated whether form- and meaning-based predictability enhanced the perceptual clarity of degraded speech for individuals with moderate to severe sensorineural HI, a group for whom such enhancement may be particularly important. Design: Spoken sentences with high or low semantic coherence were degraded by noise-vocoding and preceded by matching or nonmatching text primes. Matching text primes allowed generation of form-based predictions while semantic coherence allowed generation of meaning-based predictions. Results: The results showed that both form- and meaning-based predictions make degraded speech seem clearer to individuals with HI. The benefit of form-based predictions was seen across levels of speech quality and was greater for individuals with HI in the present study than for individuals without HI in our previous study. However, for individuals with HI, the benefit of meaning-based predictions was only apparent when the speechwas slightly degraded. When it was more severely degraded, the benefit of meaning-based predictions was only seen when matching text primes preceded the degraded speech. The benefit in terms of perceptual clarity of meaning-based predictions was positively related to verbal fluency but not working memory performance. Conclusions: Taken together, these results demonstrate that, for individuals with HI, form-based predictability has a robust effect on perceptual clarity that is greater than the effect previously shown for individuals without HI. However, when speech quality is moderately or severely degraded, meaning-based predictability is contingent on form-based predictability. Further, the ability to mobilize the lexicon seems to contribute to the strength of meaning-based predictions. Whereas individuals without HI may be able to devote explicit working memory capacity for storing meaning-based predictions, individuals with HI may already be using all available explicit capacity to process the degraded speech and thus become reliant on explicit skills such as their verbal fluency to generate useful meaning-based predictions