Multiple instances of vocal sensorimotor adaptation to frequency-altered feedback within a single experimental session

Vocal sensory-motor adaptation is typically studied by introducing a prolonged change in auditory feedback. While it may be preferable to perform multiple blocks of adaptation within a single experiment, it is possible that a carry-over effect from previous blocks of adaptation may affect the results of subsequent blocks. Speakers were asked to vocalize an ∕a∕ sound and match a target note during ten adaptation blocks. Each block represented a unique combination of target note and shift direction. The adaptation response was found to be similar for all blocks, indicating that there were no carry-over effects from previous blocks of adaptation

The influence of increased working memory load on semantic neural systems: a high-resolution event-related brain potential study

NRC publication: Ye

Separating phonological and semantic processing in auditory sentence processing: A high-resolution event-related brain potential study

Phonological and semantic processing was studied using high-resolution event-related brain potentials (ERPs) during a sentence-matching task to investigate the spatial distribution of the phonological mismatch negativity (PMN) and the N400 response. It was hypothesized that the two components were spatially separable and that the activity matched prior localization knowledge. Participants examined visual-auditory sentence pairs that related within a semantic hierarchy (e.g., visual: "The man is teaching in the classroom"; Auditory: "The man is in the em leader school/barn"). Semantic congruency was varied for the final words of the spoken sentences. Incongruent words mismatched expectation in terms of both the initial phonological features (unexpected sound) and semantic features (unexpected meaning). In addition, the category-exemplar probability of the final words was either high or low, with low probability words being more difficult to anticipate. Low probability words were predicted to selectively affect PMN activity. We found that incongruent words elicited a PMN (287 msec) and a N400 (424 msec), for both the high and low probability words. As expected, low probability congruent words elicited a small PMN but no N400. In contrast, high probability congruent words elicited neither a detectible PMN nor a N400. The primary PMN sources were in left inferior frontal and inferior parietal lobes. The primary N400 source activation occurred along the left perisylvian cortex, consistent with prior N400 source localization work. From these results, it was concluded that the PMN and N400 were localized to separate cortical language (and memory) regions and had different source activation patterns.NRC publication: Ye