Auditory Recognition Research Articles

Knowledge of a second language influences auditory word recognition in the native language.

Many studies in bilingual visual word recognition have demonstrated that lexical access is not language selective. However, research on bilingual word recognition in the auditory modality has been scarce, and it has yielded mixed results with regard to the degree of this language nonselectivity. In the present study, we investigated whether listening to a second language (L2) is influenced by knowledge of the native language (L1) and, more important, whether listening to the L1 is also influenced by knowledge of an L2. Additionally, we investigated whether the listener's selectivity of lexical access is influenced by the speaker's L1 (and thus his or her accent). With this aim, Dutch-English bilinguals completed an English (Experiment 1) and a Dutch (Experiment 3) auditory lexical decision task. As a control, the English auditory lexical decision task was also completed by English monolinguals (Experiment 2). Targets were pronounced by a native Dutch speaker with English as the L2 (Experiments 1A, 2A, and 3A) or by a native English speaker with Dutch as the L2 (Experiments 1B, 2B, and 3B). In all experiments, Dutch-English bilinguals recognized interlingual homophones (e.g., lief [sweet]-leaf /li:f/) significantly slower than matched control words, whereas the English monolinguals showed no effect. These results indicate that (a) lexical access in bilingual auditory word recognition is not language selective in L2, nor in L1, and (b) language-specific subphonological cues do not annul cross-lingual interactions.

Facilitated auditory detection for speech sounds.

If it is well known that knowledge facilitates higher cognitive functions, such as visual and auditory word recognition, little is known about the influence of knowledge on detection, particularly in the auditory modality. Our study tested the influence of phonological and lexical knowledge on auditory detection. Words, pseudo-words, and complex non-phonological sounds, energetically matched as closely as possible, were presented at a range of presentation levels from sub-threshold to clearly audible. The participants performed a detection task (Experiments 1 and 2) that was followed by a two alternative forced-choice recognition task in Experiment 2. The results of this second task in Experiment 2 suggest a correct recognition of words in the absence of detection with a subjective threshold approach. In the detection task of both experiments, phonological stimuli (words and pseudo-words) were better detected than non-phonological stimuli (complex sounds), presented close to the auditory threshold. This finding suggests an advantage of speech for signal detection. An additional advantage of words over pseudo-words was observed in Experiment 2, suggesting that lexical knowledge could also improve auditory detection when listeners had to recognize the stimulus in a subsequent task. Two simulations of detection performance performed on the sound signals confirmed that the advantage of speech over non-speech processing could not be attributed to energetic differences in the stimuli.

Orthographic Consistency and Word-Frequency Effects in Auditory Word Recognition: New Evidence from Lexical Decision and Rime Detection

Many studies have repeatedly shown an orthographic consistency effect in the auditory lexical decision task. Words with phonological rimes that could be spelled in multiple ways (i.e., inconsistent words) typically produce longer auditory lexical decision latencies and more errors than do words with rimes that could be spelled in only one way (i.e., consistent words). These results have been extended to different languages and tasks, suggesting that the effect is quite general and robust. Despite this growing body of evidence, some psycholinguists believe that orthographic effects on spoken language are exclusively strategic, post-lexical, or restricted to peculiar (low-frequency) words. In the present study, we manipulated consistency and word-frequency orthogonally in order to explore whether the orthographic consistency effect extends to high-frequency words. Two different tasks were used: lexical decision and rime detection. Both tasks produced reliable consistency effects for both low- and high-frequency words. Furthermore, in Experiment 1 (lexical decision), an interaction revealed a stronger consistency effect for low-frequency words than for high-frequency words, as initially predicted by Ziegler and Ferrand (1998), whereas no interaction was found in Experiment 2 (rime detection). Our results extend previous findings by showing that the orthographic consistency effect is obtained not only for low-frequency words but also for high-frequency words. Furthermore, these effects were also obtained in a rime detection task, which does not require the explicit processing of orthographic structure. Globally, our results suggest that literacy changes the way people process spoken words, even for frequent words.

Decreasing complexity of affective space in older adults lower on cognitive control: Affective effects in a nonaffective task and with nonaffective stimuli.

Many theoretical accounts predict that as people age, they rely increasingly on affect. At least one account (Dynamic Integration Theory) makes the additional prediction that an accompanying effect of aging is a narrowing of affective space. These predictions were tested in the context of the relatively automatic low-level cognitive process of lexical access (auditory word recognition). Experiment 1 used emotion words and Experiment 2 used nonemotion words. Both experiments provided support for both predictions. Compared to younger adults (ns = 36 and 56), older adults (ns = 36 and 54) showed larger but less complex effects of dimensions of affective connotation. In addition, older adults with more cognitive resources showed a data pattern like that of younger adults, while those with fewer resources did not. Affective effects emerge even in nonaffective contexts. The tight link between affect and cognition is discussed.

Social Cognition: Feeling Voices to Recognize Emotions

Our understanding of how we simulate other people's actions and feelings to recognize their emotional states is extended by a new study which finds that premotor and somatosensory cortices are required to process the emotional meaning of sounds.

Multisensory perception of action in posterior temporal and parietal cortices

Environmental events produce many sensory cues for identifying the action that evoked the event, the agent that performed the action, and the object targeted by the action. The cues for identifying environmental events are usually distributed across multiple sensory systems. Thus, to understand how environmental events are recognized requires an understanding of the fundamental cognitive and neural processes involved in multisensory object and action recognition. Here, we investigated the neural substrates involved in auditory and visual recognition of object-directed actions. Consistent with previous work on visual recognition of isolated objects, visual recognition of actions, and recognition of environmental sounds, we found evidence for multisensory audiovisual event-selective activation bilaterally at the junction of the posterior middle temporal gyrus and the lateral occipital cortex, the left superior temporal sulcus, and bilaterally in the intraparietal sulcus. The results suggest that recognition of events through convergence of visual and auditory cues is accomplished through a network of brain regions that was previously implicated only in visual recognition of action.

Suppressing Sensorimotor Activity Modulates the Discrimination of Auditory Emotions But Not Speaker Identity

Our ability to recognize the emotions of others is a crucial feature of human social cognition. Functional neuroimaging studies indicate that activity in sensorimotor cortices is evoked during the perception of emotion. In the visual domain, right somatosensory cortex activity has been shown to be critical for facial emotion recognition. However, the importance of sensorimotor representations in modalities outside of vision remains unknown. Here we use continuous theta-burst transcranial magnetic stimulation (cTBS) to investigate whether neural activity in the right postcentral gyrus (rPoG) and right lateral premotor cortex (rPM) is involved in nonverbal auditory emotion recognition. Three groups of participants completed same-different tasks on auditory stimuli, discriminating between the emotion expressed and the speakers' identities, before and following cTBS targeted at rPoG, rPM, or the vertex (control site). A task-selective deficit in auditory emotion discrimination was observed. Stimulation to rPoG and rPM resulted in a disruption of participants' abilities to discriminate emotion, but not identity, from vocal signals. These findings suggest that sensorimotor activity may be a modality-independent mechanism which aids emotion discrimination.

There goes the neighborhood: Lipreading and the structure of the mental lexicon

A central question in spoken word recognition research is whether words are recognized relationally, in the context of other words in the mental lexicon ( McClelland and Elman, 1986; Luce and Pisoni, 1998). The current research evaluated metrics for measuring the influence of the mental lexicon on visually perceived (lipread) spoken word recognition. Lexical competition (the extent to which perceptually similar words influence recognition of a stimulus word) was quantified using metrics that are well-established in the literature, as well as a novel statistical method for calculating perceptual confusability, based on the Phi-square statistic. The Phi-square statistic proved an effective measure for assessing lexical competition and explained significant variance in visual spoken word recognition beyond that accounted for by traditional metrics. Because these values include the influence of a large subset of the lexicon (rather than only perceptually similar words), it suggests that even perceptually distant words may receive some activation, and therefore provide competition, during spoken word recognition. This work supports and extends earlier research ( Auer, 2002; Mattys et al., 2002) that proposed a common recognition system underlying auditory and visual spoken word recognition and provides support for the use of the Phi-square statistic for quantifying lexical competition.

Visual, auditory and bimodal recognition of people and cars

Visual, auditory and bimodal recognition of people and cars

Auditory recognition and prediction using a hierarchy of time-scales

Auditory recognition and prediction using a hierarchy of time-scales

Negative feedback influences auditory recognition: behavioral and event-related potential evidence

Stress induced by negative feedback is known to impair recognition memory, although little is known about its neural correlates. Immediately before an auditory recognition test, a negative- and positive-feedback group received different, faked scores about their performance in a Tower-of-Hanoi task. Negative feedback increased reaction times for correct rejections of new sounds. Although the positive-feedback group showed frontally and parietally more positive-going event-related potentials for correctly recognized old items than correct rejections (OLD/NEW effect) between 400 and 700 ms, suggesting the presence of familiarity and recollection-related recognition processes, the negative-feedback group showed late (>1100 ms) sustained right-frontal OLD/NEW effects possibly reflecting postmemory monitoring. Hence, negative feedback might change recognition memory by disabling recollection in favor of postmemory monitoring processes.

Hemispheric asymmetries in phonological processing of tones versus segmental units.

The aim of this functional magnetic resonance imaging study is to identify neuroanatomical substrates underlying phonological processing of segmental (consonant, rhyme) and suprasegmental (tone) units. An auditory verbal recognition paradigm was used in which native speakers of Mandarin Chinese were required to match a phonological unit that occurs in a list of three syllables to the corresponding unit of a following probe. The results show that hemispheric asymmetries arise depending on the type of phonological unit. In direct contrasts between phonological units, tones, relative to consonants and rhymes, yield increased activation in frontoparietal areas of the right hemisphere. This finding indicates that the cortical circuitry subserving lexical tones differs from that of consonants or rhymes.

Differential Influence of Frequency, Timing, and Intensity Cues in a Complex Acoustic Categorization Task

Songbirds, which, like humans, learn complex vocalizations, provide an excellent model for the study of acoustic pattern recognition. Here we examined the role of three basic acoustic parameters in an ethologically relevant categorization task. Female zebra finches were first trained to classify songs as belonging to one of two males and then asked whether they could generalize this knowledge to songs systematically altered with respect to frequency, timing, or intensity. Birds' performance on song categorization fell off rapidly when songs were altered in frequency or intensity, but they generalized well to songs that were changed in duration by >25%. Birds were not deaf to timing changes, however; they detected these tempo alterations when asked to discriminate between the same song played back at two different speeds. In addition, when birds were retrained with songs at many intensities, they could correctly categorize songs over a wide range of volumes. Thus although they can detect all these cues, birds attend less to tempo than to frequency or intensity cues during song categorization. These results are unexpected for several reasons: zebra finches normally encounter a wide range of song volumes but most failed to generalize across volumes in this task; males produce only slight variations in tempo, but females generalized widely over changes in song duration; and all three acoustic parameters are critical for auditory neurons. Thus behavioral data place surprising constraints on the relationship between previous experience, behavioral task, neural responses, and perception. We discuss implications for models of auditory pattern recognition.

Implicit Memory Formation during Routine Anesthesia in Children

Implicit memory cannot be consciously recalled but may be revealed by changes in behavior. There is evidence for implicit memory formation during anesthesia in adults, but several studies in children have found no evidence for implicit memory. This may be due to insensitive testing. Also many of these tests were undertaken under controlled conditions. It remains unknown whether implicit memory is formed during routine pediatric anesthesia. The aim of this study was to determine whether there is evidence of implicit memory formation during routine anesthesia in children, using a degraded auditory stimulus recognition task. Three hundred and twelve children, aged 5-12 yr, were randomly assigned to be played either a sheep sound or white noise continuously through headphones during general anesthesia. No attempt was made to standardize the anesthetic. On recovery, children were played a sheep sound degraded by a white noise mask that progressively decreased over 60 s, with the outcome being the time taken to correctly recognize the sheep sound. Three hundred children completed the task. A comparison of the distribution of recognition times between the two groups found little evidence that exposure to a sheep sound during anesthesia was associated with postoperative time to recognition of a degraded sheep sound (hazard ratio 1.14, 95% CI of 0.90-1.43, P = 0.28). No implicit memory formation during routine anesthesia was demonstrated in children. It is increasingly likely that the potential clinical implications of implicit memory formation are less of a concern for pediatric anesthetists.

THIS MONTH IN Anesthesiology

Guidelines for the use of transesophageal echocardiography are updated.A novel fiberoptic technique to guide epidural needle placement is described. See the accompanying Editorial View on page 1073 Treatment of adrenal insufficiency in brain-dead patients is evaluated.A population-based study that provides a detailed overview of postoperative mortality for several surgeries is reviewed. See the accompanying Editorial View on page 1065 Changes in α-amino-3-hydroxy-5-methyl-4-isoxazolepropionic acid receptor trafficking in persistent pain are reviewed.Approximately 3,500 blood transfusions are given to intensive care unit (ICU) patients daily in the United States. Although there are no reliable predictors of transfusion requirements, ICU patients with functional iron deficiency may be at higher risk for developing anemia requiring blood transfusion. A prospective cohort study of 62 patients was conducted to assess the effects of low reticulocyte hemoglobin content (CHr <29 pg) on transfusion rates. The overall transfusion rate was 22.6%; the rate was 39.1% versus 12.8%, in low-CHr and normal-CHr patients, respectively. Patients with low CHr (37%) had a longer median ICU stay (8 vs. 5 days), were more likely to have sepsis, and were more prone to acute renal failure (39% vs. 13%) and ICU-acquired infection (30% vs. 10%) compared with patients with normal CHr. Low CHr was significantly associated with transfusion regardless of age, severity of illness, trauma, or hemoglobin level. Low CHr is common at ICU admission and was associated with higher transfusion requirements.Despite evidence for implicit memory, which may result in changes in behavior during anesthesia in adults, evidence in children is less clear. This randomized, double-blind controlled trial in children aged 5 to 12 yr (N = 312) used perceptual priming (via a degraded auditory stimulus recognition task) to detect potential development of implicit memory after anesthesia. Either a sheep sound or white noise was played continuously through headphones during general anesthesia. On recovery, children were played a sheep sound degraded by a white noise mask that progressively decreased over 60 s, with the outcome being the time taken to correctly recognize the sheep sound. There was little evidence that exposure to a sheep sound during anesthesia was associated with postoperative time to recognition of a degraded sheep sound. This study presents additional support that implicit memory formation during routine anesthesia is not a clinical concern for pediatric anesthesiologists. See the accompanying Editorial View on page 1063 Mortality after cardiac surgery may be associated with patient-related and surgery-related variables such as persistent hypotension and the cumulative duration of low processed electroencephalogram-based bispectral index (BIS). This prospective, randomized study assessed the relationships among cumulative duration of low BIS (<45), intermediate-term mortality, and anesthetic dose in patients (N = 460) who underwent cardiac surgery during a 1-yr period. During a median follow-up of 3 yr, 17.8% of patients died. There was no statistically significant difference in end-tidal anesthetic gas concentrations between patients who died and those who survived. However, cumulative duration of low BIS was independently associated with intermediate-term mortality with a 29% increased risk of death for every cumulative hour spent with a BIS less than 45. These data suggest that intermediate-term mortality after cardiac surgery was not causally related to excessive anesthetic dose. See the accompanying Editorial View on page 1070

The processing of auditory and visual recognition of self-stimuli

This study examined self-recognition processing in both the auditory and visual modalities by determining how comparable hearing a recording of one's own voice was to seeing photograph of one's own face. We also investigated whether the simultaneous presentation of auditory and visual self-stimuli would either facilitate or inhibit self-identification. Ninety-one participants completed reaction-time tasks of self-recognition when presented with their own faces, own voices, and combinations of the two. Reaction time and errors made when responding with both the right and left hand were recorded to determine if there were lateralization effects on these tasks. Our findings showed that visual self-recognition for facial photographs appears to be superior to auditory self-recognition for voice recordings. Furthermore, a combined presentation of one's own face and voice appeared to inhibit rather than facilitate self-recognition and there was a left-hand advantage for reaction time on the combined-presentation tasks.

Auditory recognition memory is inferior to visual recognition memory

Visual memory for scenes is surprisingly robust. We wished to examine whether an analogous ability exists in the auditory domain. Participants listened to a variety of sound clips and were tested on their ability to distinguish old from new clips. Stimuli ranged from complex auditory scenes (e.g., talking in a pool hall) to isolated auditory objects (e.g., a dog barking) to music. In some conditions, additional information was provided to help participants with encoding. In every situation, however, auditory memory proved to be systematically inferior to visual memory. This suggests that there exists either a fundamental difference between auditory and visual stimuli, or, more plausibly, an asymmetry between auditory and visual processing.

Auditory recognition in dyslexics improves with visual and motor-visual practice

Auditory recognition in dyslexics improves with visual and motor-visual practice

Memory Is Enhanced at Behaviorally Relevant Times

​HumanHuman memory for visual scenes varies according to a number of factors. These include the novelty of the scene, its behavioral relevance, and the subject's attention. Often, people will clearly remember details of the context in which they received shocking news—for example, remembering where they were and what they were doing when they heard that Elvis had died. This raises the possibility that another factor that can influence memory, even for irrelevant details, is the co-occurrence of a highly relevant stimulus. What determines whether an image is remembered or forgotten? New evidence suggests that attending to a task in the foreground could enhance memory for scenes in the background at behaviorally relevant points in time. In a new study in this issue of PLoS Biology, Lin et al. tested this theory using a technique called “rapid serial visual presentation” or RSVP. This protocol involves showing subjects a series of visual scenes, each scene being visible for only a short time, and then testing recognition memory by asking subjects whether a particular scene was present in the series. The researchers began by presenting subjects with a series of 16 familiar scenes, and then testing whether they could identify which scenes had been presented. Surprisingly, performance on this task was no better than chance. However, when the series of scenes was presented at the same time as a letter recognition task to which the subjects had to pay attention, the subjects were significantly better at recognising scenes that had been presented simultaneously with the target letter (which was white among black distractor letters) than at recognising scenes that were presented with the distractors. This supports the idea that a visual scene can be automatically committed to memory at Behaviorally relevant time points, such as when a target is presented during a task. But does this apply only to visual targets, or can other types of highly relevant stimulus also enhance visual scene memory? The authors addressed this question by presenting visual scenes while subjects attended to an auditory tone recognition task. As in the letter recognition task, subjects' memories were enhanced for the scene that was presented when the target tone was played. To test whether the memory enhancement effect depended on the behavioral relevance of the target stimulus or on its physical novelty compared with the non-target stimuli, the authors repeated the letter recognition experiment, but instructed the subjects to ignore the letter stimuli and instead concentrate on the scene recognition task. Under these conditions, there was no memory enhancement; subjects were no more likely to correctly recognise the scene that had been presented with the white target letter than those that had been presented with the black distractor letters. This suggests that behavioral relevance, rather than perceptual novelty, is responsible for the enhanced scene memory in the preceding experiments. These studies point towards a new mechanism by which attention can influence memory, in which memory for background scene can be enhanced even though attention is focused tightly on a target item in the foreground—or even on a target sound. Further studies are likely to investigate the parameters of this effect and to address the potential mechanisms of memory enhancement. Lin JY, Pype AD, Murray SO, Boynton GM (2010) Enhanced Memory for Scenes Presented at Behaviorally Relevant Points in Time. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1000337

Implicit memory formation in children during anesthesia

Aim: To determine whether there is implicit memory formation in children during anesthesia.Background: Previous work with adults has found that cognitive processing may persist despite clinically adequate anesthesia, resulting in the formation of implicit memories that cannot be consciously recalled but may be revealed by changes in behavior [1]. Because of methodological limitations in the few pediatric studies that have been conducted, it remains unclear whether this also occurs in children [2,3]. Implicit memories may play a role in postoperative negative behavior changes in children [4].Methods: The ‘degraded auditory stimulus recognition task’ has been validated for the detection of implicit memories in a pediatric anesthetic setting [5]. Three hundred and twelve children, aged 5 to 12 years old, were randomly assigned to be played either a sheep sound or white noise continuously through headphones during general anesthesia. On recovery, children were played a sheep sound degraded by a white noise mask that progressively decreased over 60 s, with the outcome being time taken to correctly recognize the sound.Results: Three hundred children completed the task. A comparison of the distribution of recognition times between the two groups found little evidence that intraoperative exposure to a sheep sound was associated with postoperative time to recognition of a degraded sheep sound (hazard ratio 1.14, 95% confidence interval of 0.90–1.40, P = 0.28).Conclusions: No evidence was found for implicit memory formation in children during anesthesia. It is increasingly likely that the clinical implications of this phenomenon are less of a concern for pediatric anesthetists.References 1 Andrade J, Deeprose C. Unconscious memory formation during anaesthesia. Best Pract Res Clin Anaesthesiol 2007; 21(3):385‐401.2 Andrade J, Deeprose C, Barker I. Awareness and memory function during paediatric anaesthesia. Br J Anaesth 2008; 100(3):389‐96.3 L opez U, Habre W, Laurencon M, Willems SJ, Schmidt C, Van der Linden M et al. Does implicit memory during anaesthesia persist in children? Br J Anaesth 2009; 102(3):379‐84.4 Stargatt R. A cohort study of the incidence and risk factors for negative behavior changes in children after general anesthesia. Paediatr Anaesth 2006; 16(8):846‐59.5 Phelan L, Sheppard SJ, Davidson AJ. A new degraded auditory stimulus test to measure implicit memory during anaesthesia in children. Anaesth Intensive Care 2009; 37(1):60‐5.