Role of Genetic and Acquired Prothrombotic Risk Factors in Genesis of Sudden Sensorineural Hearing Loss

The methylenetetrahydrofolate reductase C677T mutation, factor V G1691A (factor V Leiden) mutation, prothrombin G20210A mutation and 8 other laboratory values associated with increased thrombotic risk were analyzed in 40 patients with sudden sensorineural hearing loss (SSHL). The results were compared with those obtained from 120 controls not affected by SSHL. We found a statistically significant higher frequency of hyperhomocysteinemia in the SSHL group compared with controls, and that this was also associated with the presence of homozygosity for the MTHFR C677T mutation. The study results suggest that SSHL might be caused, among other factors, by a combination of these 2 variables. We suggest that this analysis of the MTHFR C677T mutation should be further investigated to establish the etiology of SSHL, and that the same analysis should be taken into account in those patients with high levels of homocysteine.

from Audiology & Neuro-Otology

Leftward Lateralization of Auditory Cortex Underlies Holistic Sound Perception in Williams Syndrome

Individuals with the rare genetic disorder Williams-Beuren syndrome (WS) are known for their characteristic auditory phenotype including strong affinity to music and sounds. In this work we attempted to pinpoint a neural substrate for the characteristic musicality in WS individuals by studying the structure-function relationship of their auditory cortex. Since WS subjects had only minor musical training due to psychomotor constraints we hypothesized that any changes compared to the control group would reflect the contribution of genetic factors to auditory processing and musicality.

from PLoS ONE

Cognitive consequences of childhood-onset temporal lobe epilepsy across the adult lifespan

Our findings suggest that the profile of cognitive deficits associated with MTLE is already established as children with temporal lobe epilepsy enter adulthood. While memory and language skills are maximally affected, intellectual function is also compromised in MTLE. This profile appears to remain stable across the adult lifespan, at least until 60 years of age, despite the intractable nature of the seizures. Side of pathology and gender are significant mediating factors in shaping the profile of cognitive deficits associated with childhood-onset MTLE, with people with left-sided HS and female subjects particularly vulnerable to more widespread cognitive dysfunction.

from Neurology

Language as a Window Into Sociability

People with Williams syndrome-known for their indiscriminate friendliness and ease with strangers-process spoken language differently from people with autism spectrum disorders-characterized by social withdrawal and isolation-found researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies.

from ScienceDaily.com

Auditory Word Serial Recall Benefits from Orthographic Dissimilarity

The influence of orthographic knowledge has been consistently observed in speech recognition and metaphonological tasks. The present study provides data suggesting that such influence also pervades other cognitive domains related to language abilities, such as verbal working memory. Using serial recall of auditory seven-word lists, we observed that inter-item orthographic dissimilarity assists verbal working memory by reducing or even avoiding the detrimental effect of phonological similarity. However, this orthographic modulation of the phonological similarity effect only occurred at positions four to six of the word list. Performance at position seven benefited from a recency effect that may be assumed to result from a more surface-level (acoustic-phonetic) representation, while better performance at positions one to three is attributable to primacy effects, and can be accounted for in terms of consolidation through recapitulation. The beneficial influence of orthographic knowledge may, therefore, only be apparent when the item stored in short-term memory takes the form of an abstract but unconsolidated phonological representation.

from Language and Speech

Is a FAN Always FUN? Phonological and Orthographic Effects in Bilingual Visual Word Recognition

A visual semantic categorization task in English was performed by native English speakers (Experiment 1) and late bilinguals whose first language was Japanese (Experiment 2) or Spanish (Experiment 3). In the critical conditions, the target word was a homophone of a correct category exemplar (e.g., A BODY OF WATER—SEE; cf. SEA) or a word that differed from the correct exemplar by a phonological contrast absent in the bilinguals’ first language (e.g., USED FOR COOLING DOWN—FUN; cf. FAN). Homophones elicited more false positive errors and slower processing than spelling controls in all groups. The Japanese—English bilinguals, but not the Spanish—English bilinguals, also displayed ‘near-homophone’ effects (i.e., homophone-like effects from minimal pairs on nonnative contrasts). We conclude that second-language visual word recognition is influenced by first-language phonology, although the effect is conditioned by the first-language orthographic system. Near-homophone effects can occur when the orthographic systems of the late bilingual’s two languages are different in type (e.g., alphabetic vs. non-alphabetic), but may be blocked if the languages use the same writing script (e.g., Roman alphabet).

A visual semantic categorization task in English was performed by native English speakers (Experiment 1) and late bilinguals whose first language was Japanese (Experiment 2) or Spanish (Experiment 3). In the critical conditions, the target word was a homophone of a correct category exemplar (e.g., A BODY OF WATER—SEE; cf. SEA) or a word that differed from the correct exemplar by a phonological contrast absent in the bilinguals’ first language (e.g., USED FOR COOLING DOWN—FUN; cf. FAN). Homophones elicited more false positive errors and slower processing than spelling controls in all groups. The Japanese—English bilinguals, but not the Spanish—English bilinguals, also displayed ‘near-homophone’ effects (i.e., homophone-like effects from minimal pairs on nonnative contrasts). We conclude that second-language visual word recognition is influenced by first-language phonology, although the effect is conditioned by the first-language orthographic system. Near-homophone effects can occur when the orthographic systems of the late bilingual’s two languages are different in type (e.g., alphabetic vs. non-alphabetic), but may be blocked if the languages use the same writing script (e.g., Roman alphabet).

from Language and Speech

Learning the Phonological Forms of New Words: Effects of Orthographic and Auditory Input

We investigated the relationship between the phonological and orthographic representations of new words for adult learners. Three groups of native English speakers learned a set of auditorily-presented pseudowords along with pictures indicating their “meanings”. They were later tested on their memory of the words via an auditory word—picture matching test. While all three groups of participants heard the same auditory stimuli and saw the same pictures, the groups differed with respect to the written stimuli that accompanied each item during training. Some participants were presented with written forms for the auditory labels that were consistent with English spelling conventions (e.g., spelled form , auditory form [k m d]), while others saw written forms that were not consistent with English spelling conventions (e.g., spelled form , auditory form [k m d]), and a third group of participants was presented with no written forms. Participants who saw written forms that were not consistent with English spelling conventions showed interference from the words’ spelled forms at test. This finding provides evidence for a relationship between orthographic and phonological representations for newly-learned words.

from Language and Speech

Long-Term Horizontal Vocal Directivity of Opera Singers: Effects of Singing Projection and Acoustic Environment

Vocal directivity refers to how directional the sound is that comes from a singer’s mouth, that is, whether the sound is focused into a narrow stream of sound projecting in front of the singers or whether it is spread out all around the singer. This study investigates the long-term vocal directivity and acoustic power of professional opera singers and how these vary among subjects, among singing projections, and among vastly different acoustic environments. The vocal sound of eight professional opera singers (six females and two males) was measured in anechoic and reverberant rooms and in a recital hall. Subjects sang in four different ways: (1) paying great attention to intonation; (2) singing as in performance, with all the emotional connection intended by the composer; (3) imagining a large auditorium; and (4) imagining a small theatre. The same song was sung by all singers in all conditions. A head and torso simulator (HATS), radiating sound from its mouth, was used for comparison in all situations. Results show that individual singers have quite consistent long-term average directivity, even across conditions. Directivity varies substantially among singers. Singers are more directional than the standard HATS (which is a physical model of a talking person). The singer’s formant region of the spectrum exhibits greater directivity than the lower-frequency range, and results indicate that singers control directivity (at least, incidentally) for different singing conditions as they adjust the spectral emphasis of their voices through their formants.

from the Journal of Voice

auditory-tactile speech perception in congenitally blind and sighted adults

The present study investigated whether manual tactile information from a speaker’s face modulates the intelligibility of speech when audio-tactile perception is compared with audio-only perception. Since more elaborated auditory and tactile skills have been reported in the blind, two groups of congenitally blind and sighted adults were compared. Participants performed a forced-choice syllable decision task across three conditions: audio-only and congruent/incongruent audio-tactile conditions. For the auditory modality, the syllables were embedded or not in noise while, for the tactile modality, participants felt in synchrony a mouthed syllable by placing a hand on the face of a talker. In the absence of acoustic noise, syllables were almost perfectly recognized in all conditions. On the contrary, with syllables embedded with acoustic noise, more correct responses were reported in case of congruent mouthing compared to no mouthing, and in case of no mouthing compared to incongruent mouthing. Interestingly, no perceptual differences were observed between blind and sighted adults. These findings demonstrate that manual tactile information relevant to recovering speech gestures modulates auditory speech perception in case of degraded acoustic information and that audio-tactile interactions occur similarly in blind and sighted untrained listeners.

from Neuropsychologia

The Visual Magnocellular Pathway in Chinese-Speaking Children with Developmental Dyslexia

Previous research into the cognitive processes involved in reading Chinese and developmental dyslexia in Chinese, revealed that the single most important factor appears to be orthographic processing skills rather than phonological skills. Also some studies have indicated that even in alphabetic languages some dyslexic individuals reveal deficits in orthographic processing skills, which are linked to a deficit in the visual magnocellular pathway. The current study therefore employed a visual psychophysical experiment together with visual and auditory event-related potential (ERP) experiments eliciting mismatch negativity (MMN) to investigate the link between visual magnocellular functional abnormalities and developmental dyslexia in Chinese. The performance levels of Chinese children with developmental dyslexia (DD) from the behavioural and electrophysiological experiments were compared to those of the chronological age-matched (CA) children and those of the reading level matched (RL) younger children. Both the behavioural and electrophysiological results suggest that the orthographic processing skills were compromised in the Chinese developmental dyslexics, which in turn is linked to a deficit in the visual magnocellular system.

from Neuropsychologia

Wii-Like Technologies May Help Stroke Survivors Improve Communication Skills

Motion sensing technologies, such as the Nintendo Wii Remote, could be used in the rehabilitation of people with aphasia – a language impairment, commonly caused by a stroke, that affects around 250,000 people in the UK1.

from Medical News Today.com

Age-related and individual differences in the use of prediction during language comprehension

During sentence comprehension, older adults are less likely than younger adults to predict features of likely upcoming words. A pair of experiments assessed whether such differences would extend to tasks with reduced working memory demands and time pressures. In Experiment 1, event-related brain potentials were measured as younger and older adults read short phrases cuing antonyms or category exemplars, followed three seconds later by targets that were either congruent or incongruent and, for congruent category exemplars, of higher or lower typicality. When processing the less expected low typicality targets, younger – but not older – adults elicited a prefrontal positivity (500–900 ms) that has been linked to processing consequences of having predictions disconfirmed. Thus, age-related changes in prediction during comprehension generalize across task circumstances. Analyses of individual differences revealed that older adults with higher category fluency were more likely to show the young-like pattern. Experiment 2 showed that these age-related differences were not due to simple slowing of language production mechanisms, as older adults generated overt responses to the cues as quickly as – and more accurately than – younger adults. However, older adults who were relatively faster to produce category exemplars in Experiment 2 were more likely to have shown predictive processing patterns in Experiment 1. Taken together, the results link prediction during language comprehension to language production mechanisms and suggest that although older adults can produce speeded language output on demand, they are less likely to automatically recruit these mechanisms during comprehension unless top-down circuitry is particularly strong.

from Brain and Language

Executive functions in individuals with intellectual disability

The aim of the present study was to investigate executive functions in adults with intellectual disability, and compare them to a closely matched control group longitudinally for 5 years. In the Betula database, a group of adults with intellectual disability (ID, n = 46) was defined from measures of verbal and non-verbal IQ. A control group, with two people for every person with intellectual disability (n = 92), was chosen by matching on the following criterion in order of priority: IQ higher than 85, age, sex, sample, level of education, and years of education. Three types of tasks of executive functions were included on two occasions, with 5 years between testing sessions: The Tower of Hanoi, executively loaded dual task versions of word recall, and verbal fluency. Adults with ID showed significant impairments on verbal fluency and on the executively loaded dual task word recall task (at encoding but not at recall). There were no group differences on the Tower of Hanoi. No significant differences between the two test occasions were found. The results are interpreted in terms of individuals with ID having problems with speed of accessing lexical items and difficulties with working memory-related executive control at encoding, which includes shifting between tasks. There are, however, not necessarily problems with inhibition. The dual task results additionally imply that the adults with intellectual disability were more sensitive to strategy interruptions at encoding, but that dividing attention at recall did not have such detrimental effects.

from Research in Developmental Disabilities

Underspecification and asymmetries in voicing perception

The purpose of our study is to show that phonological knowledge is an important basis for making predictions during speech perception. Taking the phonological constraint in English that coda obstruent clusters agree in their value for voicing, we conducted two experiments using vowel–stop–fricative sequences, where the task was to identify the fricative. Stimuli included sequences that were either congruent or incongruent. Consistent with models of featural underspecification for voiceless obstruents, our results indicate that only voiced stops induced predictions for an upcoming voiced fricative, eliciting processing difficulty when such predictions were not met. In contrast, voiceless stops appear to induce no equivalent predictions. These results demonstrate the important role of abstract phonological knowledge in online processing, and the asymmetries in our findings also suggest that only specified features are the basis for generating perceptual predictions about the upcoming speech signal.

from Phonology

The Auditory Brainstem Implant: One Child’s Success Story

The auditory brainstem implant (ABI) is a technology that has been available, in a limited capacity, to adults with hearing loss for a number of years. However, very few children with hearing loss in the United States have received an ABI when other hearing technology has proved unbeneficial. In this examination of a single case of a child with an ABI, the technology has been shown to improve communication and verbal performance, perhaps illustrating a possible wider application of ABIs for similar children.

from The Hearing Review