Large-scale multi-site study shows no association between musical training and early auditory neural sound encoding
Musical training has been reported to be associated with enhanced neural processing of sounds, as measured via the frequency following response (FFR), implying the potential for human subcortical neural plasticity. We conducted a large-scale multi-site preregistered study (n > 260) to replicate and extend the findings underpinning this important relationship. We failed to replicate any of the […]
Systematic bias in surface area asymmetry measurements from automatic cortical parcellations
Anatomical asymmetry is a hallmark of the human brain and may reflect hemispheric differences in its functional organization. Widely used software like FreeSurfer can automate neuroanatomical measurements and facilitate studies of hemispheric asymmetry. However, patterns of surface area lateralization measured using FreeSurfer are curiously consistent across diverse samples. Here, we demonstrate systematic biases in these […]
Foreign language talker identification does not generalize to new talkers
Listeners identify talkers less accurately in a foreign language than in their native language, but it remains unclear whether this language-familiarity effect arises because listeners (1) simply lack experience identifying foreign-language talkers or (2) gain access to additional talker-specific information during concurrent linguistic processing of talkers’ speech. Here, we tested whether sustained practice identifying talkers […]
Talker change detection by listeners varying in age and hearing loss
Despite a vast literature on how speech intelligibility is affected by hearing loss and advanced age, remarkably little is known about the perception of talker-related information in these populations. Here, we assessed the ability of listeners to detect whether a change in talker occurred while listening to and identifying sentence-length sequences of words. Participants were […]
Sensory modality and information domain contribute jointly to dual-task interference between working memory and perceptual processing
Making sense of our environment requires us to extract temporal and spatial information from multiple sensory modalities, particularly audition and vision. Often, we must hold this sensory information in working memory (WM) to guide future actions, while simultaneously processing new sensory inputs as they arise. However, these processes of WM maintenance and perceptual processing can […]
Efficient functional localization of language regions in the brain
Important recent advances in the cognitive neuroscience of language have been made using functional localizers to demarcate language-selective regions in individual brains. Although single-subject localizers offer insights that are unavailable in classic group analyses, they require additional scan time that imposes costs on investigators and participants. In particular, the unique practical challenges of scanning children […]
Energetic and informational masking place dissociable demands on listening effort: Evidence from simultaneous electroencephalography and pupillometry
The task of processing speech masked by concurrent speech/noise can pose a substantial challenge to listeners. However, performance on such tasks may not directly reflect the amount of listening effort they elicit. Changes in pupil size and neural oscillatory power in the alpha range (8–12 Hz) are prominent neurophysiological signals known to reflect listening effort; however, […]
Both stronger and weaker cerebro-cerebellar functional connectivity patterns during processing of spoken sentences in autism spectrum disorder
Cerebellar differences have long been documented in autism spectrum disorder (ASD), yet the extent to which such differences might impact language processing in ASD remains unknown. To investigate this, we recorded brain activity with magnetoencephalography (MEG) while ASD and age-matched typically developing (TD) children passively processed spoken meaningful English and meaningless Jabberwocky sentences. Using a […]
Diminished repetition suppression reveals selective and systems-level face processing differences in ASD
Repeated exposure to a stimulus results in reduced neural response, or repetition suppression, in brain regions responsible for processing that stimulus. This rapid accommodation to repetition is thought to underlie learning, stimulus selectivity, and strengthening of perceptual expectations. Importantly, reduced sensitivity to repetition has been identified in several neurodevelopmental, learning, and psychiatric disorders, including autism […]
Atypical cortical processing of bottom-up speech binding cues in children with autism spectrum disorders
Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) commonly display speech processing abnormalities. Binding of acoustic features of speech distributed across different frequencies into coherent speech objects is fundamental in speech perception. Here, we tested the hypothesis that the cortical processing of bottom-up acoustic cues for speech binding may be anomalous in ASD. We recorded magnetoencephalography while […]