Biology subjects

Honbolygo, F.

Publications and source records attributed to Honbolygo, F..

5 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2024

Examining the Central Auditory Processing Using a Multi-Feature ERP Paradigm to Phonetic, Prosodic and Acoustic Features

Previous studies have shown that multi-feature paradigms can be used for the investigation of the central auditory processing. In this study, we developed a speech multi-feature paradigm with phonetic, prosodic, and acoustic changes. Our aim was to examine the participants involuntary discrimination of the changes of speech sound features while they were watching a movie without any sound or subtitles. All five deviant conditions (vowel, consonant, stress, intensity, frequency) elicited statistically significant MMN ERP responses which varied in amplitude depending on the condition; stress was also connected with the occurrence of the LDN component. With vowel, consonant and stress among the conditions that received the most statistically significant ERPs, we could suggest that the current multi-feature paradigm can be used to successfully elicit the MMN ERP component and potentially to assess phonological processing in children and adults.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2022

Speech prosody supports speaker selection and auditory stream segregation in a multi-talker situation

To process speech in a multi-talker environment, listeners need to segregate the mixture of incoming speech streams and focus their attention on one of them. Potentially, speech prosody could aid the segregation of different speakers, the selection of the desired speech stream, and detecting targets within the attended stream. For testing these issues, we recorded behavioral responses and extracted event-related potentials and functional brain networks from electroencephalographic signals recorded while participants listened to two concurrent speech streams, performing a lexical detection and a recognition memory task in parallel. Prosody manipulation was applied to the attended speech stream in one group of participants and to the ignored speech stream in another group. Naturally recorded speech stimuli were either intact, synthetically F0-flattened, or suppressed by the speaker. Results show that prosody - especially the parsing cues mediated by speech rate - facilitates stream selection, while playing a smaller role in auditory stream segmentation and target detection.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2018

Word stress representations are language specific: evidence from event-related brain potentials

Understanding speech at the basic levels entails the simultaneous and independent processing of phonemic and prosodic features. While it is well-established that phoneme perception relies on language-specific long-term traces, it is unclear if the processing of prosodic features similarly involves language-specific representations. In the present study, we investigated the processing of a specific prosodic feature, word stress, using the method of event-related brain potentials (ERPs) employing a cross-linguistic approach. Hungarian participants heard disyllabic pseudowords stressed either on the first (legal stress) or on the second (illegal stress) syllable, pronounced either by a Hungarian or a German speaker. Results obtained using a data-driven ERP analysis methodology showed that all pseudowords in the deviant position elicited an Early Differentiating Negativity (EDN) and a Mismatch Negativity (MMN) component, except for the Hungarian pseudowords stressed on the first syllable. This suggests that Hungarian listeners did not process the native legal stress pattern as deviant, but the same stress pattern with a non-native accent was processed as deviant. This implies that the processing of word stress was based on language-specific long-term memory traces.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2018

A novel virtual plus-maze for studying electrophysiological correlates of spatial reorientation

Quick reorientation is an essential part of successful navigation. Despite growing attention to this ability, little is known about how reorientation happens in humans. To this aim, we recorded EEG from 34 participants. Participants were navigating a simple virtual reality plus-maze where at the beginning of each trial they were randomly teleported to either the North or the South alley. Results show that the teleportation event caused a quick reorientation effect over occipito-parietal areas as early as 100 msec; meaning that despite the known stochastic nature of the teleportation, participants built up expectations for their place of arrival. This result has important consequences for the optimal design of Virtual reality locomotion.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2018

Genome Wide Association Scan identifies new variants associated with a cognitive predictor of dyslexia.

Developmental dyslexia (DD) is one of the most prevalent learning disorders among children and is characterized by deficits in different cognitive skills, including reading, spelling, short term memory and others. To help unravel the genetic basis of these skills, we conducted a Genome Wide Association Study (GWAS), including nine cohorts of reading-impaired and typically developing children of European ancestry, recruited across different countries (N=2,562-3,468).\n\nWe observed a genome-wide significant effect (p<1x10-8) on rapid automatized naming of letters (RANlet) for variants on 18q12.2 within MIR924HG (micro-RNA 924 host gene; p = 4.73x10-9), and a suggestive association on 8q12.3 within NKAIN3 (encoding a cation transporter; p = 2.25 x10-8). RAN represents one of the best universal predictors of reading fluency across orthographies and linkage to RAN has been previously reported within CELF4 (18q12.2), a gene highly expressed in the fetal brain which is co-expressed with NKAIN3 and predicted to be a target of MIR924. These findings suggest new candidate DD susceptibility genes and provide insights into the genetics and neurobiology of dyslexia.

genomics↗