1. Auditory Cortex 3 Sept 18, 2015 – DAY 11
Brain & Language
LING
NSCI
Fall 2015

2. Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University
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Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University
Course organization
Fun with
I am still working on grading.

3. Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University
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Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University
Auditory cortex 2
review

4. Where is auditory cortex?
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Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University
Where is auditory cortex?

5. BA 41 actually curves down & onto medial surface
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Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University
BA 41 actually curves down & onto medial surface

6. A1 = core, A2 = belt, A3 = parabelt
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Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University
A1 = core, A2 = belt, A3 = parabelt

7. Tonotopy from cochlea to core
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Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University
Tonotopy from cochlea to core

8. It is the core that preserves tonotopy
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Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University
It is the core that preserves tonotopy

9. Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University
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Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University
The big picture

10. Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University
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Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University
What is a spectrum?

11. White light refracted to spectrum
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Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University
White light refracted to spectrum

12. Where is a spectrum in speech?
F09-bapa.png
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Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University

13. Dichotic listening to speech sounds
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Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University
Dichotic listening to speech sounds
Strong right-ear advantage
Weak right-ear advantage
No right-ear advantage
stops (p,b,t,d,k,g)
liquids (l,r), glides (y,w), fricatives (f,v,θ,ð,s,z,ʃ,ʒ)
vowels
short duration, fast change
medium duration
long duration

14. Timing is also important
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Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University
Timing is also important

15. Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University
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Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University
Hemispheric windows

16. Windows of temporal integration
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Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University
Windows of temporal integration

17. Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University
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Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University
Auditory cortex 3

18. Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University
Review of prosody
Prosody is the quality of spoken language that provides its melodic contour and rhythm, features which help the hearer to decode syntactic and lexical meaning as well as emotional content.
Prosody differentiates, say, the neutral statement of fact “It’s my fault” from the sarcastic question-like rejoinder “It’s MY fault?”.
Such distinctions are produced by variation in three parameters, which are borne in turn by three qualities of sound waves, respectively:
sound waves
prosody
fundamental frequency
pitch
intensity
stress
timing
duration
Hypothesis?
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Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University

19. Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University
9/18/15
Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University
Prosody and the RH
It has been known since the 1970s that the right hemisphere dominates in the perception of prosody. Initial evidence thereof were the descriptions of lesions in the right hemisphere resulting in a pattern of aprosodias (deficits either in the expression or understanding of prosody) analogous to the well-documented pattern of left hemisphere lesions resulting in the various aphasias.
With respect to production, the speech of patients with right hemisphere lesions has been characterized as monotonous and unmodulated. For instance, Ross & Mesulam (1979) report a patient who had difficulty disciplining her children because they could not detect when she was upset or angry. She eventually learned to emphasize her speech by adding "I mean it!" to the end of her sentences.
With respect to perception, studies such as that of Tucker, Watson & Heilman (1977) asked people to identify semantically-neutral sentences that were intoned to convey happiness, sadness, anger, or indifference. Patients with RHD were impaired on both identification and discrimination of such affective meanings, in comparison to both healthy controls (NBD) and LHD.
Aprosodia, see Ross (1981).

20. Hypotheses about emotional prosodic deficits
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Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University
Hypotheses about emotional prosodic deficits
Similarity to depression
result of alterations in subjective emotional experience;
but coming out of depression does not cure prosodic deficit.
General disturbance in encoding emotional behavior
co-occurs with reduced expressiveness of gestures and facial expressions.

21. Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University
9/18/15
Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University
Ethofer et al. (2006) Effects of prosodic emotional intensity on activation of associative auditory cortex
Passive listening to adjectives and substantives with neutral word content, spoken in five different emotional intonations (happy, neutral, fearful, angry and alluring)
All four emotional categories induced stronger responses within the right mid-STG than neutral stimuli 
These responses were significantly correlated with several acoustic parameters (stimulus duration, mean intensity, mean pitch and pitch variability).

22. Kinds of linguistic prosody
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Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University
Kinds of linguistic prosody
Lexical and phrasal prosody, see next 2 slides.
Sentence type and prosodic contour.
Contrastive (or emphatic or focal) stress.
Determining whether two sentences are identical based on any of these stress patterns.

23. Lexical prosody (CAPS mark stressed syllable)
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Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University
Lexical prosody (CAPS mark stressed syllable)
Noun vs. verb in English (±15)
CONvert vs. conVERT
Thai, a tone language
naa with a rising pitch tone means “thick”
naa with a falling pitch tone means “face”
LHD (but not RHD) affects both of these rules

24. Stimuli for next experiment
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Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University
Stimuli for next experiment

25. Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University
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Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University
Luo (2006) Opposite patterns of hemisphere dominance for early auditory processing of lexical tones and consonants
We frequently presented to native Mandarin Chinese speakers a meaningful auditory word with a consonant-vowel structure and infrequently varied either its lexical tone or initial consonant using an odd-ball paradigm to create a contrast resulting in a change in word meaning.
The lexical tone contrast evoked a stronger pre-attentive response, as revealed by whole-head electric recordings of the mismatch negativity, in the right hemisphere than in the left hemisphere, whereas the consonant contrast produced an opposite pattern.

26. Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University
9/18/15
Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University
Phrasal prosody
Compound noun rule
noun phrase: hot DOG (a dog that is hot)
adjective+noun: HOTdog (a frankfurter)
noun+noun: SHEEPdog (a breed of dogs)
Stress retraction
After eating fourTEEN, CAKES did not tempt him.
After eating FOURteen CAKES, he threw up.
LHD (but not RHD) affects both of these rules

27. Contrastive (or emphatic or focal) stress [clausal prosody]
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Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University
Contrastive (or emphatic or focal) stress [clausal prosody]
Examples
The horses were racing from the BARN.
The HORSES were racing from the barn.
LHD (but not RHD) affects this

28. Sentence type and prosodic contour
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Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University
Sentence type and prosodic contour
Types
declarative: fall in pitch at end
I eat chocolate.
interrogative: rise for yes-no question (a); fall for interrogative pronoun (b)
Do you eat chocolate?
What do you eat?
imperative: even pitch throughout; rise in intensity at end
Eat chocolate!
RHD (but not LHD) reduces accuracy and variation in pitch

29. Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University
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Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University
Summary
LH (preserved in RHD)
RH (preserved in LHD)
lexical stress
CONvert ~ conVERT
tone languages
phrasal stress
noun compounding
stress retraction
clausal stress
contrastive stress
emotional prosody
sentence type
declarative, interrogative, imperative

30. Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University
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Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University
NEXT TIME
More on auditory cortex; reading posted to Blackboard