BIROn - Birkbeck Institutional Research Online

    Hemispheric asymmetry of endogenous neural oscillations in young children: implications for hearing speech in noise

    Thompson, E. and Woodruff Carr, K. and White-Schwoch, T. and Tierney, Adam and Nicol, T. and Kraus, N. (2016) Hemispheric asymmetry of endogenous neural oscillations in young children: implications for hearing speech in noise. Scientific Reports 6 , p. 19737. ISSN 2045-2322.

    [img]
    Preview
    Text
    14136.pdf - Published Version of Record
    Available under License Creative Commons Attribution.

    Download (629kB) | Preview

    Abstract

    Speech signals contain information in hierarchical time scales, ranging from short-duration (e.g., phonemes) to long-duration cues (e.g., syllables, prosody). A theoretical framework to understand how the brain processes this hierarchy suggests that hemispheric lateralization enables specialized tracking of acoustic cues at different time scales, with the left and right hemispheres sampling at short (25 ms; 40 Hz) and long (200 ms; 5 Hz) periods, respectively. In adults, both speech-evoked and endogenous cortical rhythms are asymmetrical: low-frequency rhythms predominate in right auditory cortex, and high-frequency rhythms in left auditory cortex. It is unknown, however, whether endogenous resting state oscillations are similarly lateralized in children. We investigated cortical oscillations in children (3–5 years; N = 65) at rest and tested our hypotheses that this temporal asymmetry is evident early in life and facilitates recognition of speech in noise. We found a systematic pattern of increasing leftward asymmetry for higher frequency oscillations; this pattern was more pronounced in children who better perceived words in noise. The observed connection between left-biased cortical oscillations in phoneme-relevant frequencies and speech-in-noise perception suggests hemispheric specialization of endogenous oscillatory activity may support speech processing in challenging listening environments, and that this infrastructure is present during early childhood.

    Metadata

    Item Type: Article
    School: Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Science > School of Psychological Sciences
    Research Centres and Institutes: Brain and Cognitive Development, Centre for (CBCD)
    Depositing User: Adam Tierney
    Date Deposited: 11 Feb 2016 10:35
    Last Modified: 02 Aug 2023 17:21
    URI: https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/14136

    Statistics

    Activity Overview
    6 month trend
    274Downloads
    6 month trend
    466Hits

    Additional statistics are available via IRStats2.

    Archive Staff Only (login required)

    Edit/View Item Edit/View Item