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Auditory Brainstem Responses to Continuous Natural Speech in Human Listeners

Speech is an ecologically essential signal, whose processing crucially involves the subcortical nuclei of the auditory brainstem, but there are few experimental options for studying these early responses in human listeners under natural conditions. While encoding of continuous natural speech has bee...

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Autores principales: Maddox, Ross K., Lee, Adrian K. C.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Society for Neuroscience 2018
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5806592/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29435487
http://dx.doi.org/10.1523/ENEURO.0441-17.2018
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author Maddox, Ross K.
Lee, Adrian K. C.
author_facet Maddox, Ross K.
Lee, Adrian K. C.
author_sort Maddox, Ross K.
collection PubMed
description Speech is an ecologically essential signal, whose processing crucially involves the subcortical nuclei of the auditory brainstem, but there are few experimental options for studying these early responses in human listeners under natural conditions. While encoding of continuous natural speech has been successfully probed in the cortex with neurophysiological tools such as electroencephalography (EEG) and magnetoencephalography, the rapidity of subcortical response components combined with unfavorable signal-to-noise ratios signal-to-noise ratio has prevented application of those methods to the brainstem. Instead, experiments have used thousands of repetitions of simple stimuli such as clicks, tone-bursts, or brief spoken syllables, with deviations from those paradigms leading to ambiguity in the neural origins of measured responses. In this study we developed and tested a new way to measure the auditory brainstem response (ABR) to ongoing, naturally uttered speech, using EEG to record from human listeners. We found a high degree of morphological similarity between the speech-derived ABRs and the standard click-evoked ABR, in particular, a preserved Wave V, the most prominent voltage peak in the standard click-evoked ABR. Because this method yields distinct peaks that recapitulate the canonical ABR, at latencies too short to originate from the cortex, the responses measured can be unambiguously determined to be subcortical in origin. The use of naturally uttered speech to measure the ABR allows the design of engaging behavioral tasks, facilitating new investigations of the potential effects of cognitive processes like language and attention on brainstem processing.
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spelling pubmed-58065922018-02-12 Auditory Brainstem Responses to Continuous Natural Speech in Human Listeners Maddox, Ross K. Lee, Adrian K. C. eNeuro Methods/New Tools Speech is an ecologically essential signal, whose processing crucially involves the subcortical nuclei of the auditory brainstem, but there are few experimental options for studying these early responses in human listeners under natural conditions. While encoding of continuous natural speech has been successfully probed in the cortex with neurophysiological tools such as electroencephalography (EEG) and magnetoencephalography, the rapidity of subcortical response components combined with unfavorable signal-to-noise ratios signal-to-noise ratio has prevented application of those methods to the brainstem. Instead, experiments have used thousands of repetitions of simple stimuli such as clicks, tone-bursts, or brief spoken syllables, with deviations from those paradigms leading to ambiguity in the neural origins of measured responses. In this study we developed and tested a new way to measure the auditory brainstem response (ABR) to ongoing, naturally uttered speech, using EEG to record from human listeners. We found a high degree of morphological similarity between the speech-derived ABRs and the standard click-evoked ABR, in particular, a preserved Wave V, the most prominent voltage peak in the standard click-evoked ABR. Because this method yields distinct peaks that recapitulate the canonical ABR, at latencies too short to originate from the cortex, the responses measured can be unambiguously determined to be subcortical in origin. The use of naturally uttered speech to measure the ABR allows the design of engaging behavioral tasks, facilitating new investigations of the potential effects of cognitive processes like language and attention on brainstem processing. Society for Neuroscience 2018-02-09 /pmc/articles/PMC5806592/ /pubmed/29435487 http://dx.doi.org/10.1523/ENEURO.0441-17.2018 Text en Copyright © 2018 Maddox and Lee http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium provided that the original work is properly attributed.
spellingShingle Methods/New Tools
Maddox, Ross K.
Lee, Adrian K. C.
Auditory Brainstem Responses to Continuous Natural Speech in Human Listeners
title Auditory Brainstem Responses to Continuous Natural Speech in Human Listeners
title_full Auditory Brainstem Responses to Continuous Natural Speech in Human Listeners
title_fullStr Auditory Brainstem Responses to Continuous Natural Speech in Human Listeners
title_full_unstemmed Auditory Brainstem Responses to Continuous Natural Speech in Human Listeners
title_short Auditory Brainstem Responses to Continuous Natural Speech in Human Listeners
title_sort auditory brainstem responses to continuous natural speech in human listeners
topic Methods/New Tools
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5806592/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29435487
http://dx.doi.org/10.1523/ENEURO.0441-17.2018
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