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An fMRI study investigating effects of conceptually related sentences on the perception of degraded speech.

ABSTRACT: Prior research has shown that the perception of degraded speech is influenced by within sentence meaning and recruits one or more components of a frontal-temporal-parietal network. The goal of the current study is to examine whether the overall conceptual meaning of a sentence, made up of one set of words, influences the perception of a second acoustically degraded sentence, made up of a different set of words. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we presented an acoustically clear sentence followed by an acoustically degraded sentence and manipulated the semantic relationship between them: Related in meaning (but consisting of different content words), Unrelated in meaning, or Same. Results showed that listeners' word recognition accuracy for the acoustically degraded sentences was significantly higher when the target sentence was preceded by a conceptually related compared to a conceptually unrelated sentence. Sensitivity to conceptual relationships was associated with enhanced activity in middle and inferior frontal, temporal, and parietal areas. In addition, the left middle frontal gyrus (LMFG), left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG), and left middle temporal gyrus (LMTG) showed activity that correlated with individual performance on the Related condition. The superior temporal gyrus (STG) showed increased activation in the Same condition suggesting that it is sensitive to perceptual similarity rather than the integration of meaning between the sentence pairs. A fronto-temporo-parietal network appears to consolidate information sources across multiple levels of language (acoustic, lexical, syntactic, semantic) to build, and ultimately integrate conceptual information across sentences and facilitate the perception of a degraded speech signal. However, the nature of the sources of information that are available differentially recruit specific regions and modulate their activity within this network. Implications of these findings for the functional architecture of the network are considered.

SUBMITTER: Guediche S

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4875831 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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An fMRI study investigating effects of conceptually related sentences on the perception of degraded speech.

Guediche Sara S Reilly Megan M Santiago Carolina C Laurent Patryk P Blumstein Sheila E SE

Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior 20160325

Prior research has shown that the perception of degraded speech is influenced by within sentence meaning and recruits one or more components of a frontal-temporal-parietal network. The goal of the current study is to examine whether the overall conceptual meaning of a sentence, made up of one set of words, influences the perception of a second acoustically degraded sentence, made up of a different set of words. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we presented an acoustically clea ...[more]

PMID: 27100909

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Project description:Previous event-related potential (ERP) studies comparing affirmative and negative sentences revealed an N400 for semantically mismatching final words, resulting in a larger N400 for false relative to true affirmative sentences and an opposite effect for negative sentences. Hence, the N400 was independent of the presence of a negation. However, the true negative as well as the false affirmative condition often contained entities or features from different semantic categories and thereby with weak feature overlap, such as e.g., A cat is (not) a saw or Fears are (not) round, which were then compared to true affirmative and false negative sentences containing entities with stronger feature overlap and partially even hyponomy relations, e.g., A cat is (not) an animal or Planets are (not) round. Employing world-knowledge variations, in the current study, we investigate whether increasing the feature overlap between the entities of all conditions leads to similar ERP-patterns as in the previous studies. For this purpose, we use sentences of the following type: George Clooney is (not) an actor vs. George Clooney is (not) a singer where both target words describe a similar profession and thereby function as alternatives to each other. However, in line with the previous studies, we find a truth by polarity interaction, namely, the N400 ERPs are significantly larger for false compared to true affirmative sentences, whereas the effect for negative sentences shows a reversed, though not significant, trend. Overall, the ERP-data suggest that the integration of a negation with the information in its scope is neither fully incremental nor fully delayed, which might be linked to the use of cohyponyms and to the increased feature overlap between alternatives (e.g., actor, singer). Additionally, questionnaire-based rating data show that affirmative sentences are perceived as more natural than negative sentences, and, moreover, that true sentences are perceived as more natural than false sentences, independent of their polarity.

Dataset Information

An fMRI study investigating effects of conceptually related sentences on the perception of degraded speech.

Publications

An fMRI study investigating effects of conceptually related sentences on the perception of degraded speech.

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