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Purpose Phonological awareness (PA) requires the complex integration of language, speech, and auditory processing abilities. Enhanced pitch and rhythm discrimination have been shown to improve PA and speech-in-noise (SiN) discrimination. The screening of pitch and rhythm discrimination, if nonlinguistic correlates of these abilities, could contribute to screening procedures prior to diagnostic assessment. This research aimed to determine the association of PA abilities with pitch, rhythm, and SiN discrimination in children aged 5–7 years old. Method Forty-one participants' pitch, rhythm, and SiN discrimination and PA abilities were evaluated. To control for confounding factors, including biological and environmental risk exposure and gender differences, typically developing male children from high socioeconomic statuses were selected. Pearson correlation was used to identify associations between variables, and stepwise regression analysis was used to identify possible predictors of PA. Results Correlations of medium strength were identified between PA and pitch, rhythm, and SiN discrimination. Pitch and diotic digit-in-noise discrimination formed the strongest regression model (adjusted R 2 = .4213, r = .649) for phoneme–grapheme correspondence. Conclusions The current study demonstrates predictive relationships between the complex auditory discrimination skills of pitch, rhythm, and diotic digit-in-noise recognition and foundational phonemic awareness and phonic skills in young males from high socioeconomic statuses. Pitch, rhythm, and digit-in-noise discrimination measures hold potential as screening measures for delays in phonemic awareness and phonic difficulties and as components of stimulation programs.

Objective Music and speech are complex signals containing regularities in how they unfold in time. Similarities between music and speech/language in terms of their auditory features, rhythmic structure, and hierarchical structure have led to a large body of literature suggesting connections between the two domains. However, the precise underlying mechanisms behind this connection remain to be elucidated. Method In this theoretical review article, we synthesize previous research and present a framework of potentially shared neural mechanisms for music and speech rhythm processing. We outline structural similarities of rhythmic signals in music and speech, synthesize prominent music and speech rhythm theories, discuss impaired timing in developmental speech and language disorders, and discuss music rhythm training as an additional, potentially effective therapeutic tool to enhance speech/language processing in these disorders. Results We propose the processing rhythm in speech and music (PRISM) framework, which outlines three underlying mechanisms that appear to be shared across music and speech/language processing: Precise auditory processing, synchronization/entrainment of neural oscillations to external stimuli, and sensorimotor coupling. The goal of this framework is to inform directions for future research that integrate cognitive and biological evidence for relationships between rhythm processing in music and speech. Conclusion The current framework can be used as a basis to investigate potential links between observed timing deficits in developmental disorders, impairments in the proposed mechanisms, and pathology-specific deficits which can be targeted in treatment and training supporting speech therapy outcomes. On these grounds, we propose future research directions and discuss implications of our framework. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Cochlear implants (CIs) are biomedical devices that provide sound to people with severe-to-profound hearing loss by direct electrical stimulation of auditory neurons in the cochlea. Despite the remarkable achievements with respect to speech perception in quiet environments, music perception with CIs remains generally poor due to the degradation of auditory input. Prior studies have shown that both pitch perception and timbre discrimination are poor in CI users, whereas the performance on rhythmic tasks is nearly equivalent to normal hearing participants. There are several caveats, however, to this generalization regarding rhythm processing for CI users. The purpose of this article is to summarize the literature on rhythmic perception for CI users while highlighting important limitations within these studies. We will also identify areas for future research and development of CI-mediated music processing. It is likely that rhythm processing will continue to advance as our understanding of electrical current delivery to the auditory nerve improves.

There is a great deal of individual variability in outcome in second language learning, the sources of\ud which are still poorly understood. We hypothesized that individual differences in auditory processing\ud may account for some variability in second language learning. We tested this hypothesis by\ud examining psychoacoustic thresholds, auditory-motor temporal integration, and auditory neural\ud encoding in adult native Polish speakers living in the UK. We found that precise English vowel\ud perception and accurate English grammatical judgment were linked to lower psychoacoustic\ud thresholds, better auditory-motor integration, and more consistent frequency-following responses\ud to sound. Psychoacoustic thresholds and neural sound encoding explained independent variance in\ud vowel perception, suggesting that they are dissociable indexes of sound processing. These results\ud suggest that individual differences in second language acquisition success stem at least in part from\ud domain-general difficulties with auditory perception, and that auditory training could help facilitate\ud language learning in some individuals with specific auditory impairments.

The human brain's ability to extract and encode temporal regularities and to predict the timing of upcoming events is critical for music and speech perception. This work addresses how these mechanisms deal with different levels of temporal complexity, here the number of distinct durations in rhythmic patterns. We use electroencephalography (EEG) to relate the mismatch negativity (MMN), a proxy of neural prediction error, to a measure of information content of rhythmic sequences, the Shannon entropy. Within each of three conditions, participants listened to repeatedly presented standard rhythms of five tones (four inter-onset intervals) and of a given level of entropy: zero (isochronous), medium entropy (two distinct interval durations), or high entropy (four distinct interval durations). Occasionally, the fourth tone was moved forward in time that is it occurred 100 ms (small deviation) or 300 ms early (large deviation). According to the predictive coding framework, high-entropy stimuli are more difficult to model for the brain, resulting in less confident predictions and yielding smaller prediction errors for deviant sounds. Our results support this hypothesis, showing a gradual decrease in MMN amplitude as a function of entropy, but only for small timing deviants. For large timing deviants, in contrast, a modulation of activity in the opposite direction was observed for the earlier N1 component, known to also be sensitive to sudden changes in directed attention. Our results suggest the existence of a fine-grained neural mechanism that weights neural prediction error to the complexity of rhythms and that mostly manifests in the absence of directed attention.

Accurate time perception is crucial for hearing (speech, music) and action (walking, catching). Motor brain regions are recruited during auditory time perception. Therefore, the hypothesis was tested that children (age 6-7) at risk for developmental coordination disorder (rDCD), a neurodevelopmental disorder involving motor difficulties, would show nonmotor auditory time perception deficits. Psychophysical tasks confirmed that children with rDCD have poorer duration and rhythm perception than typically developing children (N = 47, d = 0.95-1.01). Electroencephalography showed delayed mismatch negativity or P3a event-related potential latency in response to duration or rhythm deviants, reflecting inefficient brain processing (N = 54, d = 0.71-0.95). These findings are among the first to characterize perceptual timing deficits in DCD, suggesting important theoretical and clinical implications.

Funder: European Research Council; doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100000781; Grant(s): GAP: 670428, Aphasia affects at least one third of stroke survivors, and there is increasing awareness that more fundamental deficits in auditory processing might contribute to impaired language performance in such individuals. We performed a comprehensive battery of psychoacoustic tasks assessing the perception of tone pairs and sequences across the domains of pitch, rhythm and timbre in 17 individuals with post-stroke aphasia and 17 controls. At the level of individual differences we demonstrated a correlation between metrical pattern (beat) perception and speech output fluency with strong effect (Spearman’s rho = 0.72). This dissociated from more basic auditory timing perception, which did not correlate with output fluency. This was also specific in terms of the language and cognitive measures, amongst which phonological, semantic and executive function did not correlate with beat detection. We interpret the data in terms of a requirement for the analysis of the metrical structure of sound to construct fluent output, with both being a function of higher-order “temporal scaffolding”. The beat perception task herein allows measurement of timing analysis without any need to account for motor output deficit, and could be a potential clinical tool to examine this. This work suggests strategies to improve fluency after stroke by training in metrical pattern perception.

© 2020 The Authors Neural activity synchronizes with the rhythmic input of many environmental signals, but the capacity of neural activity to entrain to the slow rhythms of speech is particularly important for successful communication. Compared to speech, song has greater rhythmic regularity, a more stable fundamental frequency, discrete pitch movements, and a metrical structure, this may provide a temporal framework that helps listeners neurally track information better than the rhythmically irregular rhythms of speech. The current study used EEG to examine whether entrainment to the syllable rate of linguistic utterances, as indexed by cerebro-acoustic phase coherence, was greater when listeners heard sung than spoken sentences. We assessed listeners phase-locking in both easy (no time compression) and hard (50% time-compression) utterance conditions. Adults phase-locked equally well to speech and song in the easy listening condition. However, in the time-compressed condition, phase-locking was greater for sung than spoken utterances in the theta band (3.67–5 Hz). Thus, the musical temporal and spectral characteristics of song related to better phase-locking to the slow phrasal and syllable information (4–7 Hz) in the speech stream. These results highlight the possibility of using song as a tool for improving speech processing in individuals with language processing deficits, such as dyslexia.

The brain's ability to encode temporal patterns and predict upcoming events is critical for speech perception and other aspects of social communication. Deficits in predictive coding may contribute to difficulties with social communication and overreliance on repetitive predictable environments in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Using a mismatch negativity (MMN) task involving rhythmic tone sequences of varying complexity, we tested the hypotheses that (1) individuals with ASD have reduced MMN response to auditory stimuli that deviate in presentation timing from expected patterns, particularly as pattern complexity increases and (2) amplitude of MMN signal is inversely correlated with level of impairment in social communication and repetitive behaviors. Electroencephalography was acquired as individuals (age 6-21 years) listened to repeated five-rhythm tones that varied in the Shannon entropy of the rhythm across three conditions (zero, medium-1 bit, and high-2 bit entropy). The majority of the tones conformed to the established rhythm (standard tones); occasionally the fourth tone was temporally shifted relative to its expected time of occurrence (deviant tones). Social communication and repetitive behaviors were measured using the Social Responsiveness Scale and Repetitive Behavior Scale-Revised. Both neurotypical controls (n = 19) and individuals with ASD (n = 21) show stepwise decreases in MMN as a function of increasing entropy. Contrary to the result forecasted by a predictive coding hypothesis, individuals with ASD do not differ from controls in these neural mechanisms of prediction error to auditory rhythms of varied temporal complexity, and there is no relationship between these signals and social communication or repetitive behavior measures. LAY SUMMARY: We tested the idea that the brain's ability to use previous experience to influence processing of sounds is weaker in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) than in neurotypical individuals. We found no difference between individuals with ASD and neurotypical controls in brain wave responses to sounds that occurred earlier than expected in either simple or complex rhythms. There was also no relationship between these brain waves and social communication or repetitive behavior scores.

International audience; Regular musical rhythms orient attention over time and facilitate processing. Previous research has shown that regular rhythmic stimulation benefits subsequent syntax processing in children with dyslexia and specific language impairment. The present EEG study examined the influence of a rhythmic musical prime on the P600 late evoked-potential, associated with grammatical error detection for dyslexic adults and matched controls. Participants listened to regular or irregular rhythmic prime sequences followed by grammatically correct and incorrect sentences. They were required to perform grammaticality judgments for each auditorily presented sentence while EEG was recorded. In addition, tasks on syntax violation detection as well as rhythm perception and production were administered. For both participant groups, ungrammatical sentences evoked a P600 in comparison to grammatical sentences and its mean amplitude was larger after regular than irregular primes. Peak analyses of the P600 difference wave confirmed larger peak amplitudes after regular primes for both groups. They also revealed overall a later peak for dyslexic participants, particularly at posterior sites, compared to controls. Results extend rhythmic priming effects on language processing to underlying electrophysiological correlates of morpho-syntactic violation detection in dyslexic adults and matched controls. These findings are interpreted in the theoretical framework of the Dynamic Attending Theory (Jones, 1976, 2019) and the Temporal Sampling Framework for developmental disorders (Goswami, 2011).

Background One key mechanism thought to underlie speech processing is the alignment of cortical brain rhythms to the acoustic input, a mechanism termed entrainment. Recent work showed that transcranial electrical stimulation (tES) in speech relevant frequencies or adapted to the speech envelope can in fact enhance speech processing. However, it is unclear whether an oscillatory tES is necessary, or if transients in the stimulation (e.g., peaks in the tES signal) at relevant times are sufficient. Objective In this study we used a novel pulsed-tES-protocol and tested behaviorally if a transiently pulsed - instead of a persistently oscillating - tES signal, can improve speech processing. Methods While subjects listened to spoken sentences embedded in noise, brief electric direct current pulses aligned to speech transients (syllable onsets) were applied to auditory cortex regions to modulate comprehension. Additionally, we modulated the temporal delay between tES-pulses and speech transients to test for periodic modulations of behavior, indicative of entrainment by tES. Results Speech comprehension was improved when tES-pulses were applied with a delay of 100 ms in respect to the speech transients. Contradictory to previous reports we find no periodic modulation of behavior. However, we find indications that periodic modulations can be spurious results of sampling behavioral data too coarsely. Conclusions Subject’s speech comprehension benefits from pulsed-tES, yet behavior is not modulated periodically. Thus, pulsed-tES can aid cortical entrainment to speech input, which is especially relevant in a noisy environment. Yet, pulsed-tES does not seem to entrain brain oscillations by itself.

In the "speech-to-song illusion," certain spoken phrases are heard as highly song-like when isolated from context and repeated. This phenomenon occurs to a greater degree for some stimuli than for others, suggesting that particular cues prompt listeners to perceive a spoken phrase as song. Here we investigated the nature of these cues across four experiments. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to rate how song-like spoken phrases were after each of eight repetitions. Initial ratings were correlated with the consistency of an underlying beat and within-syllable pitch slope, while rating change was linked to beat consistency, within-syllable pitch slope, and melodic structure. In Experiment 2, the within-syllable pitch slope of the stimuli was manipulated, and this manipulation changed the extent to which participants heard certain stimuli as more musical than others. In Experiment 3, the extent to which the pitch sequences of a phrase fit a computational model of melodic structure was altered, but this manipulation did not have a significant effect on musicality ratings. In Experiment 4, the consistency of intersyllable timing was manipulated, but this manipulation did not have an effect on the change in perceived musicality after repetition. Our methods provide a new way of studying the causal role of specific acoustic features in the speech-to-song illusion via subtle acoustic manipulations of speech, and show that listeners can rapidly (and implicitly) assess the degree to which nonmusical stimuli contain musical structure. (PsycINFO Database Record

Parsing continuous acoustic streams into perceptual units is fundamental to auditory perception. Previous studies have uncovered a cortical entrainment mechanism in the delta and theta bands (~1-8 Hz) that correlates with formation of perceptual units in speech, music, and other quasi-rhythmic stimuli. Whether cortical oscillations in the delta-theta bands are passively entrained by regular acoustic patterns or play an active role in parsing the acoustic stream is debated. Here we investigate cortical oscillations using novel stimuli with 1/f modulation spectra. These 1/f signals have no rhythmic structure but contain information over many timescales because of their broadband modulation characteristics. We chose 1/f modulation spectra with varying exponents of f, which simulate the dynamics of environmental noise, speech, vocalizations, and music. While undergoing magnetoencephalography (MEG) recording, participants listened to 1/f stimuli and detected embedded target tones. Tone detection performance varied across stimuli of different exponents and can be explained by local signal to noise ratio computed using a temporal window around 200 ms. Furthermore, theta band oscillations, surprisingly, were observed for all stimuli, but robust phase coherence was preferentially displayed by stimuli with exponents 1 and 1.5. We constructed an auditory processing model to quantify acoustic information on various timescales and correlated the model outputs with the neural results. We show that cortical oscillations reflect a chunking of segments, >200 ms. These results suggest an active auditory segmentation mechanism, complementary to entrainment, operating on a timescale of ~200 ms to organize acoustic information. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

Speech and music have structured rhythms, but these rhythms are rarely compared empirically. This study, based on large corpora, quantitatively characterizes and compares a major acoustic correlate of spoken and musical rhythms, the slow (0.25- 32 Hz) temporal modulations in sound intensity. We show that the speech modulation spectrum is highly consistent cross 9 languages (including languages with typologically different rhythmic characteristics, such as English, French, and Mandarin Chinese). A different, but similarly consistent modulation spectrum is observed for Western classical music played by 6 different instruments. Western music, including classical music played by single instruments, symphonic, jazz, and rock music, contains more energy than speech in the low modulation frequency range below 4 Hz. The temporal modulations of speech and music show broad but well-separated peaks around 5 and 2 Hz, respectively. These differences in temporal modulations alone, without any spectral details, can discriminate speech and music with high accuracy. Speech and music therefore show distinct and reliable statistical regularities in their temporal modulations that likely facilitate their perceptual analysis and its neural foundations.

Neurons in the auditory cortex synchronize their responses to temporal regularities in sound input. This coupling or "entrainment" is thought to facilitate beat extraction and rhythm perception in temporally structured sounds, such as music. As a consequence of such entrainment, the auditory cortex responds to an omitted (silent) sound in a regular sequence. Although previous studies suggest that the auditory brainstem frequency-following response (FFR) exhibits some of the beat-related effects found in the cortex, it is unknown whether omissions of sounds evoke a brainstem response. We simultaneously recorded cortical and brainstem responses to isochronous and irregular sequences of consonant-vowel syllable /da/ that contained sporadic omissions. The auditory cortex responded strongly to omissions, but we found no evidence of evoked responses to omitted stimuli from the auditory brainstem. However, auditory brainstem responses in the isochronous sound sequence were more consistent across trials than in the irregular sequence. These results indicate that the auditory brainstem faithfully encodes short-term acoustic properties of a stimulus and is sensitive to sequence regularity, but does not entrain to isochronous sequences sufficiently to generate overt omission responses, even for sequences that evoke such responses in the cortex. These findings add to our understanding of the processing of sound regularities, which is an important aspect of human cognitive abilities like rhythm, music and speech perception.

Rhythm and metrical regularities are fundamental properties of music and poetry - and all of those are used in the interaction between infants and their parents. Music and rhythm perception have been shown to support auditory and language skills. Here we compare newborn infants' learning from a song, a nursery rhyme, and normal speech for the first time in the same study. Infants' electrophysiological brain responses revealed that the nursery rhyme condition facilitated learning from auditory input, and thus led to successful detection of deviations. These findings suggest that coincidence of prosodic cue patterns and to-be-learned items is more important than the format of the input. Overall, the present results support the view that rhythm is likely to create a template for future events, which allows auditory system to predict prospective input and thus facilitates language development.

BACKGROUND Music engagement (the active making of music, e.g., music lessons and ensembles) is a common part of educational and community experiences. Music making typically involves listening to and production of rapidly changing combinations of pitch, timbre, and rhythm, which can be challenging for cochlear implant (CI) recipients, given that pitch and timbre are poorly conveyed through the CI. Pediatric CI users have variable patterns of music engagement, but some have achieved, sustained participation despite the degraded CI signal. What factors contribute to their persistence in these demanding listening situations? Our study examined a cohort of pediatric CI recipients from our center to better understand those perceptual and experiential factors most influential in relation to music engagement. METHOD Regressions and correlations were run for measures of pitch and speech perception, hearing history, familial involvement in music, personal importance of music, and extent of music engagement (years in music lessons; general involvement in music). RESULTS Pitch ranking accuracy was a significant predictor of sustained participation in music lessons (p = 0.0019), and sustained involvement in music (p = 0.0038), as well as performance on CNC words (p = -0.0060) and phonemes (p = -0.0174). Extent of familial involvement in music at the time of testing was significantly predictive of the user's musical engagement (p = 0.0007). Personal importance of music was not predicted by or significantly correlated with, any of the variables investigated. CONCLUSION Better pitch perception was associated with sustained involvement in music lessons as well as better speech perception. However, familial involvement in music was of greater impact for sustained music engagement. Judicious choice of musical instrument also influenced persistence. The positive impact of familial involvement indicates that perceptual limitations associated with CI processing do not present insurmountable barriers to music engagement. Because music engagement provides normalizing social involvement and challenging auditory practice, the impact of parental involvement has implications for counseling parents of CI users.

International audience; In the motor cortex, beta oscillations (∼12-30 Hz) are generally considered a principal rhythm contributing to movement planning and execution. Beta oscillations cohabit and dynamically interact with slow delta oscillations (0.5-4 Hz), but the role of delta oscillations and the subordinate relationship between these rhythms in the perception-action loop remains unclear. Here, we review evidence that motor delta oscillations shape the dynamics of motor behaviors and sensorimotor processes, in particular during auditory perception. We describe the functional coupling between delta and beta oscillations in the motor cortex during spontaneous and planned motor acts. In an active sensing framework, perception is strongly shaped by motor activity, in particular in the delta band, which imposes temporal constraints on the sampling of sensory information. By encoding temporal contextual information, delta oscillations modulate auditory processing and impact behavioral outcomes. Finally, we consider the contribution of motor delta oscillations in the perceptual analysis of speech signals, providing a contextual temporal frame to optimize the parsing and processing of slow linguistic information.

Behavioral and brain rhythms in the millisecond-to-second range are central in human music, speech, and movement. A comparative approach can further our understanding of the evolution of rhythm processing by identifying behavioral and neural similarities and differences across cognitive domains and across animal species. We provide an overview of research into rhythm cognition in music, speech, and animal communication. Rhythm has received considerable attention within each individual field, but to date, little integration. This review article on rhythm processing incorporates and extends existing ideas on temporal processing in speech and music and offers suggestions about the neural, biological, and evolutionary bases of human abilities in these domains.

Supplemental Digital Content is available in the text., Objectives: Musicians appear to have an enhanced ability to perceive speech-in-noise, prompting suggestions that musical training could be used to help people who struggle to communicate in noisy environments. This study assessed the role of sensitivity to beat, rhythm, and melody in supporting speech-in-noise perception. Design: This is an exploratory study based on correlation. The study included 24 normally hearing young adult participants with a wide range of musical training and experience. Formal and informal musical experience was measured with the training subscale of the Goldsmiths’ Musical Sophistication Index. Speech reception thresholds (SRT) were measured using the Matrix Sentence Test and three different speech-spectrum-shaped noise maskers: unmodulated and sinusoidally amplitude-modulated (modulation frequency, fm = 8 Hz; modulation depths: 60 and 80%). Primary predictors were measures of sensitivity to beat, rhythm, and melody. Secondary predictors were pure-tone frequency discrimination and auditory working memory (digit span). Any contributions from these two predictors were to be controlled for as appropriate. Results: Participants with more musical experience and greater sensitivity to rhythm, beat, and melody had better SRTs. Sensitivity to beat was more strongly linked with SRT than sensitivity to either rhythm or melody. This relationship remained strong even after factoring out contributions from frequency discrimination and auditory working memory. Conclusions: Sensitivity to beat predicted SRTs in unmodulated and modulated noise. We propose that this sensitivity maximizes benefit from fluctuations in signal-to-noise ratio through temporal orienting of attention to perceptually salient parts of the signal. Beat perception may be a good candidate for targeted training aimed at enhancing speech perception when listening in noise.

Background: Recent models of speech production suggest a link between speech production and perception. Persons with stuttering are known to have deficits in sensorimotor timing and exhibit auditory processing problems. Most of the earlier studies have focused on assessing temporal ordering in adults who stutter (AWS), but limited attempts have been made to document temporal resolution abilities in AWS. Methods: A group of 16 AWS and 16 age- and gender-matched adults who do not stutter (AWNS) were recruited for the study. Temporal resolution abilities were assessed using the Gap Detection Test and temporal modulation transfer function (TMTF). Results: The results revealed significant differences in TMTF between AWS and AWNS, but no differences were found in the gap detection thresholds. Conclusions: Results suggest that the sensory representations of the temporal modulations are compromised in AWS, which may contribute to the programming of rhythmic movements during speech planning.

Neuronal oscillations play a key role in auditory perception of verbal input, with the oscillatory rhythms of the brain showing synchronization with specific frequencies of speech. Here we investigated the neural oscillatory patterns associated with perceiving native, foreign, and unknown speech. Spectral power and phase synchronization were compared to those of a silent context. Power synchronization to native speech was found in frequency ranges corresponding to the theta band, while no synchronization patterns were found for the foreign speech context and the unknown language context. For phase synchrony, the native and unknown languages showed higher synchronization in the theta-band than the foreign language when compared to the silent condition. These results suggest that neural synchronization patterns are markedly different for native and foreign languages.

Acoustic rhythms are pervasive in speech, music, and environmental sounds. Recent evidence for neural codes representing periodic information suggests that they may be a neural basis for the ability to detect rhythm. Further, rhythmic information has been found to modulate auditory-system excitability, which provides a potential mechanism for parsing the acoustic stream. Here, we explored the effects of a rhythmic stimulus on subsequent auditory perception. We found that a low-frequency (3 Hz), amplitude-modulated signal induces a subsequent oscillation of the perceptual detectability of a brief nonperiodic acoustic stimulus (1-kHz tone); the frequency but not the phase of the perceptual oscillation matches the entrained stimulus-driven rhythmic oscillation. This provides evidence that rhythmic contexts have a direct influence on subsequent auditory perception of discrete acoustic events. Rhythm coding is likely a fundamental feature of auditory-system design that predates the development of explicit human enjoyment of rhythm in music or poetry.

This paper brings together different perspectives on the investigation and understanding of temporal processing and temporal expectations. We aim to bridge different temporal deficit hypotheses in dyslexia, dysphasia, or deafness in a larger framework, taking into account multiple nested temporal scales. We present data testing the hypothesis that temporal attention can be influenced by external rhythmic auditory stimulation (i.e., musical rhythm) and benefits subsequent language processing, including syntax processing and speech production. We also present data testing the hypothesis that phonological awareness can be influenced by several months of musical training and, more particularly, rhythmic training, which in turn improves reading skills. Together, our data support the hypothesis of a causal role of rhythm-based processing for language processing and acquisition. These results open new avenues for music-based remediation of language and hearing impairment.

The present research aimed to investigate whether, as previously observed with pictures, background auditory rhythm would also influence visual word recognition. In a lexical decision task, participants were presented with bisyllabic visual words, segmented into two successive groups of letters, while an irrelevant strongly metric auditory sequence was played in a loop. The first group of letters could either be congruent with the syllabic division of the word (e.g. val in val/se) or not (e.g. va in va/lse). In agreement with the Dynamic Attending Theory (DAT), our results confirmed that the presentation of the correct first syllable on-beat (i.e. in synchrony with a peak of covert attention) facilitated visual word recognition compared to when it was presented off-beat. However, when an incongruent first syllable was displayed on-beat, this led to an aggravation of impaired recognition. Thus, our results suggest that oscillatory attention tapped into cognitive processes rather than perceptual or decisional and motor stages. We like to think of our paradigm, which combines background auditory rhythm with segmented visual stimuli, as a sort of temporal magnifying glass which allows for the enlargement of the reaction time differences between beneficial and detrimental processing conditions in human cognition.

Stuttering is linked to sensorimotor deficits related to internal modeling mechanisms. This study compared spectral power and oscillatory activity of EEG mu (μ) rhythms between persons who stutter (PWS) and controls in listening and auditory discrimination tasks. EEG data were analyzed from passive listening in noise and accurate (same/different) discrimination of tones or syllables in quiet and noisy backgrounds. Independent component analysis identified left and/or right μ rhythms with characteristic alpha (α) and beta (β) peaks localized to premotor/motor regions in 23 of 27 people who stutter (PWS) and 24 of 27 controls. PWS produced μ spectra with reduced β amplitudes across conditions, suggesting reduced forward modeling capacity. Group time-frequency differences were associated with noisy conditions only. PWS showed increased μ-β desynchronization when listening to noise and early in discrimination events, suggesting evidence of heightened motor activity that might be related to forward modeling deficits. PWS also showed reduced μ-α synchronization in discrimination conditions, indicating reduced sensory gating. Together these findings indicate spectral and oscillatory analyses of μ rhythms are sensitive to stuttering. More specifically, these analyses can reveal stuttering-related sensorimotor processing differences in passive listening and auditory discrimination tasks which may be influenced by basal ganglia deficits.

The role of oscillatory phase for perceptual and cognitive processes is being increasingly acknowledged. To date, little is known about the direct role of phase in categorical perception. Here we show in two separate experiments that the identification of ambiguous syllables that can either be perceived as / da/ or / ga/ is biased by the underlying oscillatory phase as measured with EEG and sensory entrainment to rhythmic stimuli. The measured phase difference in which perception is biased toward / da/ or / ga/ exactly matched the different temporal onset delays in natural audiovisual speech between mouth movements and speech sounds, which last 80 ms longer for / ga/ than for / da/. These results indicate the functional relationship between prestimulus phase and syllable identification, and signify that the origin of this phase relationship could lie in exposure and subsequent learning of unique audiovisual temporal onset differences.

Research and outcomes with cochlear implants (CIs) have revealed a dichotomy in the cues necessary for speech and music recognition. CI devices typically transmit 16–22 spectral channels, each modulated slowly in time. This coarse representation provides enough information to support speech understanding in quiet and rhythmic perception in music, but not enough to support speech understanding in noise or melody recognition. Melody recognition requires some capacity for complex pitch perception, which in turn depends strongly on access to spectral fine structure cues. Thus, temporal envelope cues are adequate for speech perception under optimal listening conditions, while spectral fine structure cues are needed for music perception. In this paper, we present recent experiments that directly measure CI users’ melodic pitch perception using a melodic contour identification (MCI) task. While normal-hearing (NH) listeners’ performance was consistently high across experiments, MCI performance was highly variable across CI users. CI users’ MCI performance was significantly affected by instrument timbre, as well as by the presence of a competing instrument. In general, CI users had great difficulty extracting melodic pitch from complex stimuli. However, musically-experienced CI users often performed as well as NH listeners, and MCI training in less experienced subjects greatly improved performance. With fixed constraints on spectral resolution, such as it occurs with hearing loss or an auditory prosthesis, training and experience can provide a considerable improvements in music perception and appreciation.

Recent evidence suggests that the musical rhythm of a particular culture may parallel the speech rhythm of that culture’s language (Patel, A. D., & Daniele, J. R. (2003). An empirical comparison of rhythm in language and music. Cognition, 87, B35–B45). The present experiments aimed to determine whether listeners actually perceive such rhythmic differences in a purely musical context (i.e., in instrumental music without words). In Experiment 1a, listeners successfully classified instrumental renditions of French and English songs having highly contrastive rhythmic differences. Experiment 1b replicated this result with the same songs containing rhythmic information only. In Experiments 2a and 2b, listeners successfully classified original and rhythm-only stimuli when language-specific rhythmic differences were less contrastive but more representative of differences found in actual music and speech. These findings indicate that listeners can use rhythmic similarities and differences to classify songs originally composed in two languages having contrasting rhythmic prosody.

This study was designed to test the iambic/trochaic law, which claims that elements contrasting in duration naturally form rhythmic groupings with final prominence, whereas elements contrasting in intensity form groupings with initial prominence. It was also designed to evaluate whether the iambic/trochaic law describes general auditory biases, or whether rhythmic grouping is speech or language specific. In two experiments, listeners were presented with sequences of alternating /ga/ syllables or square wave segments that varied in either duration or intensity and were asked to indicate whether they heard a trochaic (i.e., strong-weak) or an iambic (i.e., weak-strong) rhythmic pattern. Experiment 1 provided a validation of the iambic/trochaic law in English-speaking listeners; for both speech and nonspeech stimuli, variations in duration resulted in iambic grouping, whereas variations in intensity resulted in trochaic grouping. In Experiment 2, no significant differences were found between the rhythmic-grouping performances of English- and French-speaking listeners. The speech/ nonspeech and cross-language parallels suggest that the perception of linguistic rhythm relies largely on general auditory mechanisms. The applicability of the iambic/trochaic law to speech segmentation is discussed.

Every day we communicate using complex linguistic and musical systems, yet these modern systems are the product of a much more ancient relationship with sound. When we speak, we communicate not only with the words we choose, but also with the patterns of sound we create and the movements that create them. From the natural rhythms of speech, to the precise timing characteristics of a consonant, these patterns guide our daily communication. By examining the principles of information processing that are common to speech and music, we peel back the layers to reveal the biological foundations of human communication through sound. Further, we consider how the brain's response to sound is shaped by experience, such as musical expertise, and implications for the treatment of communication disorders.

To evaluate musical perception in adult cochlear implant (CI) recipients, i.e. perceptual accuracy for pitch, timbre, rhythmic patterns and song identification.Twenty-nine adult patients were included in this transverse single-center study. Evaluative measures included tests assessing ability to discriminate pitch, rhythm and timbre and to identify nursery songs with and without verbal cues. Performance scores were correlated with duration of deafness, duration of implantation, speech discrimination and musical perception skills.A total of 38% of patients reported that they did not enjoy listening to music with their device and 86% presented lower scores of listening habits after implantation. We found positive correlations between musical background and pitch identification and identification of nursery songs played by piano. We also found positive correlations between speech discrimination and rhythm, timbre and identification of nursery songs with verbal cues.Trends in the patterns of correlation between speech and music perception suggest that music patterns are differentially accessible to CI users. New processing strategies may improve this.

Temporal cues are important for discerning word boundaries and syllable segments in speech; their perception facilitates language acquisition and development. Beat synchronization and neural encoding of speech reflect precision in processing temporal cues and have been linked to reading skills. In poor readers, diminished neural precision may contribute to rhythmic and phonological deficits. Here we establish links between beat synchronization and speech processing in children who have not yet begun to read: preschoolers who can entrain to an external beat have more faithful neural encoding of temporal modulations in speech and score higher on tests of early language skills. In summary, we propose precise neural encoding of temporal modulations as a key mechanism underlying reading acquisition. Because beat synchronization abilities emerge at an early age, these findings may inform strategies for early detection of and intervention for language-based learning disabilities.

International audience; Repetition can boost memory and perception. However, repeating the same stimulus several times in immediate succession also induces intriguing perceptual transformations and illusions. Here, we inves- tigate the Speech to Song Transformation (S2ST), a massed repetition effect in the auditory modality, which crosses the boundaries between language and music. In the S2ST, a phrase repeated several times shifts to being heard as sung. To better understand this unique cross-domain transformation, we examined the perceptual determinants of the S2ST, in particular the role of acoustics. In 2 Experiments, the effects of 2 pitch properties and 3 rhythmic properties on the probability and speed of occurrence of the transformation were examined. Results showed that both pitch and rhythmic properties are key features fostering the transformation. However, some properties proved to be more conducive to the S2ST than others. Stable tonal targets that allowed for the perception of a musical melody led more often and quickly to the S2ST than scalar intervals. Recurring durational contrasts arising from segmental grouping favoring a metrical interpretation of the stimulus also facilitated the S2ST. This was, however, not the case for a regular beat structure within and across repetitions. In addition, individual perceptual abilities allowed to predict the likelihood of the S2ST. Overall, the study demonstrated that repetition enables listeners to reinterpret specific prosodic features of spoken utterances in terms of musical structures. The findings underline a tight link between language and music, but they also reveal important differences in communicative functions of prosodic structure in the 2 domains.

We investigated the extent to which people can discriminate between languages on the basis of their characteristic temporal, rhythmic information, and the extent to which this ability generalizes across sensory modalities. We used rhythmical patterns derived from the alternation of vowels and consonants in English and Japanese, presented in audition, vision, both audition and vision at the same time, or touch. Experiment 1 confirmed that discrimination is possible on the basis of auditory rhythmic patterns, and extended it to the case of vision, using ‘aperture-close’ mouth movements of a schematic face. In Experiment 2, language discrimination was demonstrated using visual and auditory materials that did not resemble spoken articulation. In a combined analysis including data from Experiments 1 and 2, a beneficial effect was also found when the auditory rhythmic information was available to participants. Despite the fact that discrimination could be achieved using vision alone, auditory performance was nevertheless better. In a final experiment, we demonstrate that the rhythm of speech can also be discriminated successfully by means of vibrotactile patterns delivered to the fingertip. The results of the present study therefore demonstrate that discrimination between language's syllabic rhythmic patterns is possible on the basis of visual and tactile displays. This research was supported by grants PSI2012-39149, PSI2009-12859 and RYC-2008-03672 from Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (MINECO, Spain) to J. Navarra, the European COST action TD0904, and by grants PSI2010-15426 and CDS00012 from MINECO (Spain), 2009SGR-292 from Comissionat per a Universitats i Recerca del DIUE-Generalitat de Catalunya, and European Research Council (StG-2010 263145) to S. Soto-Faraco.

The purpose of this research was two-fold. Firstly to develop a music perception test for hearing aid users and secondly to evaluate the influence of non-linear frequency compression (NFC) on music perception with the use of the self-compiled test. This article focuses on the description of the development and validation of a music perception test. To date, the main direction in frequency lowering hearing aid studies has been in relation to speech perception abilities. With improvements in hearing aid technology, interest in musical perception as a dimension that could improve hearing aid users’ quality of life grew. The Music Perception Test (MPT) was designed to evaluate different aspects of rhythm, timbre, pitch and melody. The development of the MPT could be described as design based. Phase 1 of the study included test development and recording while Phase 2 entailed presentation of stimuli to normal hearing listeners (n=15) and hearing aid users (n=4). Based on the findings of Phase 2, item analysis was performed to eliminate or change stimuli that resulted in high error rates. During Phase 3 the adapted version of the test was performed on a smaller group of normal hearing listeners (n=4) and twenty hearing aid users. Results proved that normal hearing adults as well as adults using hearing aids were able to complete all the sub-tests of the MPT although hearing aid users scored less on the various sub-tests than normal hearing listeners. For the rhythm section of the MPT normal hearing listeners scored on average 93.8% versus 75.5% of hearing aid users and 83% for the timbre section compared to 62.3% by hearing aid users. Normal hearing listeners obtained an average score of 86.3% for the pitch section and 88.2% for the melody section compared to the 70.8% and 61.9% respectively obtained by hearing aid users. This implicates that the MPT can be used successfully for assessment of music perception in hearing aid users within the South African context and can therefore result in more accountable hearing aid fittings taking place. The test can further be used as a counseling tool to assist audiologists and patients in understanding the problems they experience regarding music perception and might be used for future musical training in areas where participants experience problems to customize individual fittings

Objectives/Hypothesis: The present study's aim was to assess the music perception ability for Chinese adult cochlear implant users and to investigate the correlation between music and Mandarin-Chinese lexical tone perception. Study Design: Case-control study. Methods: Twenty normal-hearing and 21 adult cochlear implant users participated in the Musical Sounds in Cochlear Implants (MuSIC) perception test, including six objective and two subjective musical subtests. The comparison of music perception performance was made between normal-hearing and cochlear implant subjects. Sixteen of the 21 cochlear implant users also performed a tone identification test to investigate the correlation between music and tone perception. Results: Cochlear implant users performed significantly worse than normal-hearing subjects on pitch discrimination, instrument identification, and instrument detection tests, whereas close to normal-hearing subjects on melody discrimination, chords discrimination, rhythm discrimination, and emotion and dissonance rating subtests. Lexical tone perception was significantly correlated with pitch discrimination, melody discrimination, and instrument identification tests. Duration of hearing aid use was found to be correlated with pitch discrimination ability of cochlear implant users. Conclusions: Chinese postlingually deafened cochlear implant users performed significantly poorer in pitch discrimination and timbre perception tasks than normal-hearing listeners. Lexical tone perception was found to be significantly correlated with music pitch perception, supporting the notion that tone and music perception may share a similar pitch perception mechanism.

Can listeners entrain to speech rhythms? Monolingual speakers of English and French and balanced English-French bilinguals tapped along with the beat they perceived in sentences spoken in a stress-timed language, English, and a syllable-timed language, French. All groups of participants tapped more regularly to English than to French utterances. Tapping performance was also influenced by the participants' native language: English-speaking participants and bilinguals tapped more regularly and at higher metrical levels than did French-speaking participants, suggesting that long-term linguistic experience with a stress-timed language can differentiate speakers' entrainment to speech rhythm. © 2011 The Author(s)., SCOPUS: ar.j, info:eu-repo/semantics/published