Effects of music advertised to support focus on mood and processing speed.

While music's effects on emotion are widely appreciated, its effects on cognition are less understood. As mobile devices continue to afford new opportunities to engage with music during work, it is important to understand associated effects on how we feel and perform. Capitalizing on potential benefits, many commercial music platforms advertise content specifically to support attentional focus and concentration.

Time-resolved hemispheric lateralization of audiomotor functional connectivity during covert speech production.

Covert speech involves the internal generation of articulatory movements and their sensory consequences. While overt speech involves a combination of feedforward and feedback signals, feedback signals may be substantially different, or even absent, during covert speech. Despite the differences, we conjectured that sensorimotor interareal communication during covert speech is implemented through the same channels recruited during overt speech.

Rhythms in Speech.

Speech can be defined as the human ability to communicate through a sequence of vocal sounds. Consequently, speech requires an emitter (the speaker) capable of generating the acoustic signal and a receiver (the listener) able to successfully decode the sounds produced by the emitter (i.e.

Reactive Inhibitory Control Precedes Overt Stuttering Events.

Research points to neurofunctional differences underlying fluent speech between stutterers and non-stutterers. Considerably less work has focused on processes that underlie stuttered vs. fluent speech.

Syllabic rhythm and prior linguistic knowledge interact with individual differences to modulate phonological statistical learning.

Phonological statistical learning - our ability to extract meaningful regularities from spoken language - is considered critical in the early stages of language acquisition, in particular for helping to identify discrete words in continuous speech. Most phonological statistical learning studies use an experimental task introduced by Saffran et al. (1996), in which the syllables forming the words to be learned are presented continuously and isochronously.

Eliciting Stuttering in School-Age and Adolescent Stutterers in Experimental Settings.

Purpose: Most neural and physiological research on stuttering focuses on the fluent speech of speakers who stutter due to the difficulty associated with eliciting stuttering reliably in the laboratory. We previously introduced an approach to elicit stuttered speech in the laboratory in adults who stutter. The purpose of this study was to determine whether that approach reliably elicits stuttering in school-age children and teenagers who stutter (CWS/TWS).

Differential activation of a frontoparietal network explains population-level differences in statistical learning from speech.

People of all ages display the ability to detect and learn from patterns in seemingly random stimuli. Referred to as statistical learning (SL), this process is particularly critical when learning a spoken language, helping in the identification of discrete words within a spoken phrase. Here, by considering individual differences in speech auditory-motor synchronization, we demonstrate that recruitment of a specific neural network supports behavioral differences in SL from speech.

Speech-to-Speech Synchronization protocol to classify human participants as high or low auditory-motor synchronizers.

The ability to synchronize a motor action to a rhythmic auditory stimulus is often considered an innate human skill. However, some individuals lack the ability to synchronize speech to a perceived syllabic rate. Here, we describe a simple and fast protocol to classify a single native English speaker as being or not being a speech synchronizer.

Language statistical learning responds to reinforcement learning principles rooted in the striatum.

Statistical learning (SL) is the ability to extract regularities from the environment. In the domain of language, this ability is fundamental in the learning of words and structural rules. In lack of reliable online measures, statistical word and rule learning have been primarily investigated using offline (post-familiarization) tests, which gives limited insights into the dynamics of SL and its neural basis.

Data-Driven Classification of Spectral Profiles Reveals Brain Region-Specific Plasticity in Blindness.

Congenital blindness has been shown to result in behavioral adaptation and neuronal reorganization, but the underlying neuronal mechanisms are largely unknown. Brain rhythms are characteristic for anatomically defined brain regions and provide a putative mechanistic link to cognitive processes. In a novel approach, using magnetoencephalography resting state data of congenitally blind and sighted humans, deprivation-related changes in spectral profiles were mapped to the cortex using clustering and classification procedures.

Integrating when and what information in the left parietal lobe allows language rule generalization.

A crucial aspect when learning a language is discovering the rules that govern how words are combined in order to convey meanings. Because rules are characterized by sequential co-occurrences between elements (e.g.

Spontaneous synchronization to speech reveals neural mechanisms facilitating language learning.

We introduce a deceptively simple behavioral task that robustly identifies two qualitatively different groups within the general population. When presented with an isochronous train of random syllables, some listeners are compelled to align their own concurrent syllable production with the perceived rate, whereas others remain impervious to the external rhythm. Using both neurophysiological and structural imaging approaches, we show group differences with clear consequences for speech processing and language learning.