The mechanism of speech processing in congenital amusia: Evidence from Mandarin speakers

Congenital amusia is a neuro-developmental disorder of pitch perception that causes severe problems with music processing but only subtle difficulties in speech processing. This study investigated speech processing in a group of Mandarin speakers with congenital amusia. Thirteen Mandarin amusics and thirteen matched controls participated in a set of tone and intonation perception tasks and two pitch threshold tasks. Compared with controls, amusics showed impaired performance on word discrimination in natural speech and their gliding tone analogs. They also performed worse than controls on discriminating gliding tone sequences derived from statements and questions, and showed elevated thresholds for pitch change detection and pitch direction discrimination. However, they performed as well as controls on word identification, and on statement-question identification and discrimination in natural speech. Overall, tasks that involved multiple acoustic cues to communicative meaning were not impacted by amusia. Only when the tasks relied mainly on pitch sensitivity did amusics show impaired performance compared to controls. These findings help explain why amusia only affects speech processing in subtle ways. Further studies on a larger sample of Mandarin amusics and on amusics of other language backgrounds are needed to consolidate these results

Electrical Brain Responses to an Auditory Illusion and the Impact of Musical Expertise

The presentation of two sinusoidal tones, one to each ear, with a slight frequency mismatch yields an auditory illusion of a beating frequency equal to the frequency difference between the two tones; this is known as binaural beat (BB). The effect of brief BB stimulation on scalp EEG is not conclusively demonstrated. Further, no studies have examined the impact of musical training associated with BB stimulation, yet musicians' brains are often associated with enhanced auditory processing. In this study, we analysed EEG brain responses from two groups, musicians and non-musicians, when stimulated by short presentation (1 min) of binaural beats with beat frequency varying from 1 Hz to 48 Hz. We focused our analysis on alpha and gamma band EEG signals, and they were analysed in terms of spectral power, and functional connectivity as measured by two phase synchrony based measures, phase locking value and phase lag index. Finally, these measures were used to characterize the degree of centrality, segregation and integration of the functional brain network. We found that beat frequencies belonging to alpha band produced the most significant steady-state responses across groups. Further, processing of low frequency (delta, theta, alpha) binaural beats had significant impact on cortical network patterns in the alpha band oscillations. Altogether these results provide a neurophysiological account of cortical responses to BB stimulation at varying frequencies, and demonstrate a modulation of cortico-cortical connectivity in musicians' brains, and further suggest a kind of neuronal entrainment of a linear and nonlinear relationship to the beating frequencies

Long-Term Training-Induced Gains of an Auditory Skill in School-Age Children As Compared With Adults

The few studies that compared auditory skill learning between children and adults found variable results, with only some children reaching adult-like thresholds following training. The present study aimed to assess auditory skill learning in children as compared with adults during single- and multisession training. It was of interest to ascertain whether children who do not reach adult-like performance following a single training session simply require additional training, or whether different mechanisms underlying skill learning need to reach maturity in order to become adult-like performers. Forty children (7–9 years) and 45 young adults (18–35 years) trained in a single session. Of them, 20 children and 24 adults continued training for eight additional sessions. Each session included six frequency discrimination thresholds at 1000 Hz using adaptive forced-choice procedure. Retention of the learning-gains was tested 6 to 8 months posttraining. Results showed that (a) over half of the children presented similar performance and time course of learning as the adults. These children had better nonverbal reasoning and working memory abilities than their non-adult-like peers. (b) The best predicting factor for the outcomes of multisession training was a child’s performance following one training session. (c) Performance gains were retained for all children with the non-adult-like children further improving, 6 to 8 months posttraining. Results suggest that mature auditory skill learning can emerge before puberty, provided that task-related cognitive mechanisms and task-specific sensory processing are already mature. Short-term training is sufficient, however, to reflect the maturity of these mechanisms, allowing the prediction of the efficiency of a prolonged training for a given child