Inferior frontal sensitivity to common speech sounds is amplified by increasing word intelligibility.

ABSTRACT: The left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) exhibits increased responsiveness when people listen to words composed of speech sounds that frequently co-occur in the English language (Vaden, Piquado, & Hickok, 2011), termed high phonotactic frequency (Vitevitch & Luce, 1998). The current experiment aimed to further characterize the relation of phonotactic frequency to LIFG activity by manipulating word intelligibility in participants of varying age. Thirty six native English speakers, 19-79 years old (mean=50.5, sd=21.0) indicated with a button press whether they recognized 120 binaurally presented consonant-vowel-consonant words during a sparse sampling fMRI experiment (TR=8 s). Word intelligibility was manipulated by low-pass filtering (cutoff frequencies of 400 Hz, 1000 Hz, 1600 Hz, and 3150 H

SUBMITTER: Vaden KI 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3207245 | biostudies-literature | 2011 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature