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Age-Related Differences in Auditory Cortex Activity During Spoken Word Recognition.

ABSTRACT: Understanding spoken words requires the rapid matching of a complex acoustic stimulus with stored lexical representations. The degree to which brain networks supporting spoken word recognition are affected by adult aging remains poorly understood. In the current study we used fMRI to measure the brain responses to spoken words in two conditions: an attentive listening condition, in which no response was required, and a repetition task. Listeners were 29 young adults (aged 19-30 years) and 32 older adults (aged 65-81 years) without self-reported hearing difficulty. We found largely similar patterns of activity during word perception for both young and older adults, centered on the bilateral superior temporal gyrus. As expected, the repetition condition resulted in significantly more activity in areas related to motor planning and execution (including the premotor cortex and supplemental motor area) compared to the attentive listening condition. Importantly, however, older adults showed significantly less activity in probabilistically defined auditory cortex than young adults when listening to individual words in both the attentive listening and repetition tasks. Age differences in auditory cortex activity were seen selectively for words (no age differences were present for 1-channel vocoded speech, used as a control condition), and could not be easily explained by accuracy on the task, movement in the scanner, or hearing sensitivity (available on a subset of participants). These findings indicate largely similar patterns of brain activity for young and older adults when listening to words in quiet, but suggest less recruitment of auditory cortex by the older adults.

SUBMITTER: Rogers CS

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8318202 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:Research on language and aging typically shows that language comprehension is preserved across the life span. Recent neuroimaging results suggest that this good performance is underpinned by age-related neural reorganization [e.g., Tyler, L. K., Shafto, M. A., Randall, B., Wright, P., Marslen-Wilson, W. D., & Stamatakis, E. A. Preserving syntactic processing across the adult life span: The modulation of the frontotemporal language system in the context of age-related atrophy. Cerebral Cortex, 20, 352-364, 2010]. The current study examines how age-related reorganization affects the balance between component linguistic processes by manipulating semantic and phonological factors during spoken word recognition in younger and older adults. Participants in an fMRI study performed an auditory lexical decision task where words varied in their phonological and semantic properties as measured by degree of phonological competition and imageability. Older adults had a preserved lexicality effect, but compared with younger people, their behavioral sensitivity to phonological competition was reduced, as was competition-related activity in left inferior frontal gyrus. This was accompanied by increases in behavioral sensitivity to imageability and imageability-related activity in left middle temporal gyrus. These results support previous findings that neural compensation underpins preserved comprehension in aging and demonstrate that neural reorganization can affect the balance between semantic and phonological processing.

| S-EPMC3601412 | biostudies-literature

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Project description:Thirty years of research has uncovered the broad principles that characterize spoken word processing across listeners. However, there have been few systematic investigations of individual differences. Such an investigation could help refine models of word recognition by indicating which processing parameters are likely to vary, and could also have important implications for work on language impairment. The present study begins to fill this gap by relating individual differences in overall language ability to variation in online word recognition processes. Using the visual world paradigm, we evaluated online spoken word recognition in adolescents who varied in both basic language abilities and non-verbal cognitive abilities. Eye movements to target, cohort and rhyme objects were monitored during spoken word recognition, as an index of lexical activation. Adolescents with poor language skills showed fewer looks to the target and more fixations to the cohort and rhyme competitors. These results were compared to a number of variants of the TRACE model (McClelland & Elman, 1986) that were constructed to test a range of theoretical approaches to language impairment: impairments at sensory and phonological levels; vocabulary size, and generalized slowing. None of the existing approaches were strongly supported, and variation in lexical decay offered the best fit. Thus, basic word recognition processes like lexical decay may offer a new way to characterize processing differences in language impairment.

| S-EPMC3523704 | biostudies-literature

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Project description:This study used electrophysiological recordings to a large sample of spoken words to track the time-course of word frequency, phonological neighbourhood density, concreteness and stimulus duration effects in two experiments. Fifty subjects were presented more than a thousand spoken words during either a go/no go lexical decision task (Experiment 1) or a go/no go semantic categorisation task (Experiment 2) while EEG was collected. Linear mixed effects modelling was used to analyze the data. Effects of word frequency were found on the N400 and also as early as 100 ms in Experiment 1 but not Experiment 2. Phonological neighbourhood density produced an early effect around 250 ms and the typical N400 effect. Concreteness elicited effects in later epochs on the N400. Stimulus duration affected all epochs and its influence reflected changes in the timing of the ERP components. Overall the results support cascaded interactive models of spoken word recognition.

| S-EPMC8078007 | biostudies-literature

Differences in Working Memory Capacity Affect Online Spoken Word Recognition: Evidence From Eye Movements.

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| S-EPMC6480998 | biostudies-literature

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| S-EPMC8484523 | biostudies-literature

Same modulation but different starting points: performance modulates age differences in inferior frontal cortex activity during word-retrieval.

Project description:The neural basis of word-retrieval deficits in normal aging has rarely been assessed and the few previous functional imaging studies found enhanced activity in right prefrontal areas in healthy older compared to younger adults. However, more pronounced right prefrontal recruitment has primarily been observed during challenging task conditions. Moreover, increased task difficulty may result in enhanced activity in the ventral inferior frontal gyrus (vIFG) bilaterally in younger participants as well. Thus, the question arises whether increased activity in older participants represents an age-related phenomenon or reflects task difficulty effects. In the present study, we manipulated task difficulty during overt semantic and phonemic word-generation and used functional magnetic resonance imaging to assess activity patterns in the vIFG in healthy younger and older adults (N = 16/group; mean age: 24 vs. 69 years). Both groups produced fewer correct responses during the more difficult task conditions. Overall, older participants produced fewer correct responses and showed more pronounced task-related activity in the right vIFG. However, increased activity during the more difficult conditions was found in both groups. Absolute degree of activity was correlated with performance across groups, tasks and difficulty levels. Activity modulation (difficult vs. easy conditions) was correlated with the respective drop in performance across groups and tasks. In conclusion, vIFG activity levels and modulation of activity were mediated by performance accuracy in a similar way in both groups. Group differences in the right vIFG activity were explained by performance accuracy which needs to be considered in future functional imaging studies of healthy and pathological aging.

| S-EPMC3305312 | biostudies-literature

Morphological and Whole-Word Semantic Processing Are Distinct: Event Related Potentials Evidence From Spoken Word Recognition in Chinese.

Project description:Behavioral and imaging studies in alphabetic languages have shown that morphological processing is a discrete and independent element of lexical access. However, there is no explicit marker of morphological structure in Chinese complex words, such that the extent to which morpheme meaning is related to word meaning is unknown. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were used in the present study to investigate the dissociation of morphemic and whole-word meaning in an auditory-auditory primed lexical decision task. All the prime and target words are compounds consisting of two Chinese morphemes. The relationship between morpheme and whole-word meaning was manipulated while controlling the phonology and orthography of the first syllable in each prime-target pair. A clear dissociation was found between morphemic and whole-word meaning on N400 amplitude and topography. Specifically, sharing a morpheme produced a larger N400 in the anterior-central electrode sites, while sharing whole-word meaning produced a smaller N400 in central-posterior electrode sites. In addition, the morphological N400 effect was negatively correlated with the participants' reading ability, with better readers needing less orthographic information to distinguish different morphemes in compound words. These findings indicate that morphological and whole-word meaning are dissociated in spoken Chinese compound word recognition and that even in the spoken language modality, good readers are better able to access the meaning of individual morphemes in Chinese compound word processing.

| S-EPMC6478770 | biostudies-literature

English Listeners Use Suprasegmental Cues to Lexical Stress Early During Spoken-Word Recognition.

Project description:We used an eye-tracking technique to investigate whether English listeners use suprasegmental information about lexical stress to speed up the recognition of spoken words in English.In a visual world paradigm, 24 young English listeners followed spoken instructions to choose 1 of 4 printed referents on a computer screen (e.g., "Click on the word admiral"). Displays contained a critical pair of words (e.g., 'admiral-'admi'ration) that were segmentally identical for their first 2 syllables but differed suprasegmentally in their 1st syllable: One word began with primary lexical stress, and the other began with secondary lexical stress. All words had phrase-level prominence. Listeners' relative proportion of eye fixations on these words indicated their ability to differentiate them over time.Before critical word pairs became segmentally distinguishable in their 3rd syllables, participants fixated target words more than their stress competitors, but only if targets had initial primary lexical stress. The degree to which stress competitors were fixated was independent of their stress pattern.Suprasegmental information about lexical stress modulates the time course of spoken-word recognition. Specifically, suprasegmental information on the primary-stressed syllable of words with phrase-level prominence helps in distinguishing the word from phonological competitors with secondary lexical stress.

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Spoken Word Recognition in Listeners with Mild Dementia Symptoms.

Project description:BackgroundDifficulty understanding speech is a common complaint of older adults. In quiet, speech perception is often assumed to be relatively automatic. However, higher-level cognitive processes play a key role in successful communication in noise. Limited cognitive resources in adults with dementia may therefore hamper word recognition.ObjectiveThe goal of this study was to determine the impact of mild dementia on spoken word recognition in quiet and noise.MethodsParticipants were 53-86 years with (n = 16) or without (n = 32) dementia symptoms as classified by the Clinical Dementia Rating scale. Participants performed a word identification task with two levels of word difficulty (few and many similar sounding words) in quiet and in noise at two signal-to-noise ratios, +6 and +3 dB. Our hypothesis was that listeners with mild dementia symptoms would have more difficulty with speech perception in noise under conditions that tax cognitive resources.ResultsListeners with mild dementia symptoms had poorer task accuracy in both quiet and noise, which held after accounting for differences in age and hearing level. Notably, even in quiet, adults with dementia symptoms correctly identified words only about 80% of the time. However, word difficulty was not a factor in task performance for either group.ConclusionThese results affirm the difficulty that listeners with mild dementia may have with spoken word recognition, both in quiet and in background noise, consistent with a role of cognitive resources in spoken word identification.

| S-EPMC9885492 | biostudies-literature

Evidence for a Spoken Word Lexicon in the Auditory Ventral Stream

Project description:Abstract The existence of a neural representation for whole words (i.e., a lexicon) is a common feature of many models of speech processing. Prior studies have provided evidence for a visual lexicon containing representations of whole written words in an area of the ventral visual stream known as the visual word form area. Similar experimental support for an auditory lexicon containing representations of spoken words has yet to be shown. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging rapid adaptation techniques, we provide evidence for an auditory lexicon in the auditory word form area in the human left anterior superior temporal gyrus that contains representations highly selective for individual spoken words. Furthermore, we show that familiarization with novel auditory words sharpens the selectivity of their representations in the auditory word form area. These findings reveal strong parallels in how the brain represents written and spoken words, showing convergent processing strategies across modalities in the visual and auditory ventral streams.

| S-EPMC10426387 | biostudies-literature

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