Entraining the Brain: Applications to Language Research and Links to Musical Entrainment

Clayton’s paper provides a clear and accessible summary of the significance of entrainment for music making, and for human behaviour in general. He notes the central role of metrical structure in musical entrainment, the possible role of oscillatory neural activity, and the core notion of phase alignment. Here I show how these same factors are central to speech processing by the human brain. I argue that entrainment to metrical structure is core to linguistic as well as musical human behaviour. I illustrate this view using entrainment data from developmental dyslexia. The core role of entrainment in efficient speech processing suggests that language difficulties in childhood may benefit from music-based remediation that focuses on multi-modal rhythmic entrainment. Alignment of linguistic and musical metrical structure seems likely to be fundamental to successful remediation

Neurociencia y Educación: ¿podemos ir de la investigación básica a su aplicación? Un posible marco de referencia desde la investigación en dislexia

ResumenLa neurociencia podría transformar la educación, pues proporciona nuevos métodos para comprender el aprendizaje y el desarrollo cognitivo, sus mecanismos causales y una forma empírica de evaluar la eficacia de diferentes pedagogías. No obstante, éste sería un objetivo a largo plazo. Desde la neurociencia educativa se debería empezar estudiando cómo los sistemas cognitivos se construyen sobre los sensoriales a lo largo del desarrollo. Aquí me centraré en el lenguaje. Pequeñas diferencias individuales iniciales en una función sensorial, por ejemplo la auditiva, podrían ser el origen de notables diferencias individuales en el desarrollo lingüístico. La neurociencia podría proporcionar una comprensión detallada de los mecanismos causales del desarrollo que vinculan la audición, el desarrollo fonológico y el desarrollo de la alfabetización. Este tipo de investigación neurocientífica básica podría orientar al campo de la educación y la pedagogía explorando los efectos que sobre estos mecanismos ejercen diferentes contextos pedagógicos y de aprendizaje.AbstractNeuroscience has the potential to transform education because it provides novel methods for understanding human learning and cognitive development. It therefore offers deeper understanding of causal mechanisms in learning and an empirical approach to evaluating the efficacy of different pedagogies. However, this will be a long-term enterprise and there will be few immediate pay-offs. Here I set out one possible framework for linking basic research in neuroscience to pedagogical questions in education. I suggest that the developing field of educational neuroscience must first study how sensory systems build cognitive systems over developmental time. I focus on one cognitive system, language, the efficient functioning of which is critical for reading acquisition. Small initial differences in sensory function, for example auditory function, have the potential to cause large differences in linguistic performance over the learning trajectory. The tools offered by neuroscience can enable better understanding of the causal developmental mechanisms linking audition, phonological development and literacy development, in fine-grained detail. Following this basic research, neuroscience can then inform education and pedagogy by exploring the effects on these neural mechanisms of different learning contexts and pedagogies

Phonological awareness, vocabulary, and word reading in children who use cochlear implants: does age of implantation explain individual variability in performance outcomes and growth?

The phonological awareness (PA), vocabulary, and word reading abilities of 19 children with cochlear implants (CI) were assessed. Nine children had an implant early (between 2 and 3.6 years) and 10 had an implant later (between 5 and 7 years). Participants were tested twice over a 12-month period on syllable, rhyme, and phoneme awareness (see James et al., 2005). Performance of Cl users was compared against younger hearing children matched for reading level. Two standardized assessments of vocabulary and single word reading were administered. As a group, the children fitted early had better performance outcomes on PA, vocabulary, and reading compared to hearing benchmark groups. The early group had significant growth on rhyme awareness, whereas the late group showed no significant gains in PA over time. There was wide individual variation in performance and growth in the Cl users. Two participants with the best overall development were both fitted with an implant late in childhoo

Studies on pollinator fauna and their relative abundance of sunflower (Helianthus annuus L.) at Pantnagar, Uttarakhand, India

Pollinators provide key services to both natural and agricultural ecosystems. Agricultural productivity depends, in part on pollinator populations from adjacent semi natural habitats.The diversity and abundance of different insect visitors on sunflower (Helianthus annuus L.) were studied at Pantnagar. A total of 12 insect visitors belonging to order Hymenoptera (9), Diptera (1), Lepidoptera (1), and Coleoptera (1) were observed visiting the blossom of sunflower. The abundance (percentage of insect/m2/2min.) of Hymenopterans were maximum (86.09%) followed by the Dipterans (22.80 %) and others (3.87%). In Hymenopterans, the honeybees (Apis bees) were observed maximum (65.22 %) followed by non Apis bees (20.39 %) and the scolid wasp (1.69 %)

Impaired extraction of speech rhythm from temporal modulation patterns in speech in developmental dyslexia

Dyslexia is associated with impaired neural representation of the sound structure of words (phonology). The “phonological deficit” in dyslexia may arise in part from impaired speech rhythm perception, thought to depend on neural oscillatory phase-locking to slow amplitude modulation (AM) patterns in the speech envelope. Speech contains AM patterns at multiple temporal rates, and these different AM rates are associated with phonological units of different grain sizes, e.g., related to stress, syllables or phonemes. Here, we assess the ability of adults with dyslexia to use speech AMs to identify rhythm patterns (RPs). We study 3 important temporal rates: “Stress” (~2 Hz), “Syllable” (~4 Hz) and “Sub-beat” (reduced syllables, ~14 Hz). 21 dyslexics and 21 controls listened to nursery rhyme sentences that had been tone-vocoded using either single AM rates from the speech envelope (Stress only, Syllable only, Sub-beat only) or pairs of AM rates (Stress + Syllable, Syllable + Sub-beat). They were asked to use the acoustic rhythm of the stimulus to identity the original nursery rhyme sentence. The data showed that dyslexics were significantly poorer at detecting rhythm compared to controls when they had to utilize multi-rate temporal information from pairs of AMs (Stress + Syllable or Syllable + Sub-beat). These data suggest that dyslexia is associated with a reduced ability to utilize AMs <20 Hz for rhythm recognition. This perceptual deficit in utilizing AM patterns in speech could be underpinned by less efficient neuronal phase alignment and cross-frequency neuronal oscillatory synchronization in dyslexia. Dyslexics' perceptual difficulties in capturing the full spectro-temporal complexity of speech over multiple timescales could contribute to the development of impaired phonological representations for words, the cognitive hallmark of dyslexia across languages

The role of phase synchronisation between low frequency amplitude modulations in child phonology and morphology speech tasks.

Recent models of the neural encoding of speech suggest a core role for amplitude modulation (AM) structure, particularly regarding AM phase alignment. Accordingly, speech tasks that measure linguistic development in children may exhibit systematic properties regarding AM structure. Here, the acoustic structure of spoken items in child phonological and morphological tasks, phoneme deletion and plural elicitation, was investigated. The phase synchronisation index (PSI), reflecting the degree of phase alignment between pairs of AMs, was computed for 3 AM bands (delta, theta, beta/low gamma; 0.9-2.5 Hz, 2.5-12 Hz, 12-40 Hz, respectively), for five spectral bands covering 100-7250 Hz. For phoneme deletion, data from 94 child participants with and without dyslexia was used to relate AM structure to behavioural performance. Results revealed that a significant change in magnitude of the phase synchronisation index (ΔPSI) of slower AMs (delta-theta) systematically accompanied both phoneme deletion and plural elicitation. Further, children with dyslexia made more linguistic errors as the delta-theta ΔPSI increased. Accordingly, ΔPSI between slower temporal modulations in the speech signal systematically distinguished test items from accurate responses and predicted task performance. This may suggest that sensitivity to slower AM information in speech is a core aspect of phonological and morphological development

Exploration of various flours as pollen substitutes for Apis mellifera L. during Dearth period at Tarai region of Uttarakhand, India

Studies on evaluation of various flours as pollen substitutes and availability of pollen resources for Apis mellifera honey bees were conducted at Govind Ballabh Pant University of Agriculture &amp; Technology, Pantnagar, India during 2010. Four flours were taken viz. Soybean, Maize, Wheat and Gram as pollen substitutes for A. mellifera. All the flours were mixed with honey and water to make a total of 4 treatments (4 flours + honey + water). Treatment T1 (Soybean flour + honey + water) were found to be best in reference to visitation of bees with a mean number of 32.59 honey bee foragers /5min/day and weight loss in flours was 19.12 g due to foraging by bees followed by the treatment T3 (Maize flour + honey + water) and T2 (Wheat flour + honey + water) were found 29.30 and 23.05, respectively. Gram flour + honey + water (T4) combination were found to be least preferred pollen substitute for A. mellifera (19.76 honey bee foragers/5min/day) with a weight loss 6.66 g. The overall study has great significance for bee keepers. The use of pollen substitute is important for growth and development of the bee colonies not only in dearth periods but also at other times (during foraging, pollination process and to overcome pesticide exposures.). From the present findings it can be concluded that although bees have accepted and grew on all the diets

Basic auditory processing and sensitivity to prosodic structure in children with specific language impairments: a new look at a perceptual hypothesis.

Children with specific language impairments (SLIs) show impaired perception and production of spoken language, and can also present with motor, auditory, and phonological difficulties. Recent auditory studies have shown impaired sensitivity to amplitude rise time (ART) in children with SLIs, along with non-speech rhythmic timing difficulties. Linguistically, these perceptual impairments should affect sensitivity to speech prosody and syllable stress. Here we used two tasks requiring sensitivity to prosodic structure, the DeeDee task and a stress misperception task, to investigate this hypothesis. We also measured auditory processing of ART, rising pitch and sound duration, in both speech ("ba") and non-speech (tone) stimuli. Participants were 45 children with SLI aged on average 9 years and 50 age-matched controls. We report data for all the SLI children (N = 45, IQ varying), as well as for two independent SLI subgroupings with intact IQ. One subgroup, "Pure SLI," had intact phonology and reading (N = 16), the other, "SLI PPR" (N = 15), had impaired phonology and reading. Problems with syllable stress and prosodic structure were found for all the group comparisons. Both sub-groups with intact IQ showed reduced sensitivity to ART in speech stimuli, but the PPR subgroup also showed reduced sensitivity to sound duration in speech stimuli. Individual differences in processing syllable stress were associated with auditory processing. These data support a new hypothesis, the "prosodic phrasing" hypothesis, which proposes that grammatical difficulties in SLI may reflect perceptual difficulties with global prosodic structure related to auditory impairments in processing amplitude rise time and duration.This project has been funded by the Nuffield Foundation.This is the final published version. It first appeared at http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00972/abstract

The Role of Paired Associate Learning in Acquiring Letter-Sound Correspondences: A Longitudinal Study of Children at Family Risk for Dyslexia

Published online: 08 Dec 2020Visual-verbal-paired associate learning (PAL) is strongly related to reading acquisition, possibly indexing a distinct cross-modal mechanism for learning letter-sound associations. We measured linguistic abilities (nonword repetition, vocabulary size) longitudinally at 3.5 and 4.0 years, and visual-verbal PAL and letter knowledge at 4.0 and 4.5 years, in pre-reading children either at family risk for dyslexia (N = 27) or not (N = 25). Only nonword repetition predicted individual differences in later letter-sound knowledge, and PAL did not make a cross-sectional nor a longitudinal contribution. The data show a continuous relationship between linguistic processing abilities and letter-sound learning, with no independent role for PAL.This research was supported by the Australian Research Council grant DP110105123, ‘The Seeds of Literacy’, to the 2nd and 3rd authors. The first author’s work is supported by the Basque Government through the BERC 2018-2021 program and by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation through the Ramon y Cajal Research Fellowship, PID2019-105528GA-I00