Predicting speech from a cortical hierarchy of event-based time scales.

How do predictions in the brain incorporate the temporal unfolding of context in our natural environment? We here provide evidence for a neural coding scheme that sparsely updates contextual representations at the boundary of events. This yields a hierarchical, multilayered organization of predictive language comprehension. Training artificial neural networks to predict the next word in a story at five stacked time scales and then using model-based functional magnetic resonance imaging, we observe an event-based “surprisal hierarchy” evolving along a temporoparietal pathway.

Personality captures dissociations of subjective versus objective hearing in noise.

Acoustic noise is pervasive in human environments. Some individuals are more tolerant to noise than others. We demonstrate the explanatory potential of Big-5 personality traits neuroticism (being emotionally unstable) and extraversion (being enthusiastic, outgoing) on subjective self-report and objective psycho-acoustic metrics of hearing in noise in two samples (total = 1103).

Temporal selectivity declines in the aging human auditory cortex.

Current models successfully describe the auditory cortical response to natural sounds with a set of spectro-temporal features. However, these models have hardly been linked to the ill-understood neurobiological changes that occur in the aging auditory cortex. Modelling the hemodynamic response to a rich natural sound mixture in N = 64 listeners of varying age, we here show that in older listeners' auditory cortex, the key feature of temporal rate is represented with a markedly broader tuning.

Homology and Specificity of Natural Sound-Encoding in Human and Monkey Auditory Cortex.

Understanding homologies and differences in auditory cortical processing in human and nonhuman primates is an essential step in elucidating the neurobiology of speech and language. Using fMRI responses to natural sounds, we investigated the representation of multiple acoustic features in auditory cortex of awake macaques and humans. Comparative analyses revealed homologous large-scale topographies not only for frequency but also for temporal and spectral modulations.

Temporal Sensitivity Measured Shortly After Cochlear Implantation Predicts 6-Month Speech Recognition Outcome.

Objectives: Psychoacoustic tests assessed shortly after cochlear implantation are useful predictors of the rehabilitative speech outcome. While largely independent, both spectral and temporal resolution tests are important to provide an accurate prediction of speech recognition. However, rapid tests of temporal sensitivity are currently lacking.

Upregulation of cognitive control networks in older adults' speech comprehension.

Speech comprehension abilities decline with age and with age-related hearing loss, but it is unclear how this decline expresses in terms of central neural mechanisms. The current study examined neural speech processing in a group of older adults (aged 56-77, n = 16, with varying degrees of sensorineural hearing loss), and compared them to a cohort of young adults (aged 22-31, n = 30, self-reported normal hearing). In a functional MRI experiment, listeners heard and repeated back degraded sentences (4-band vocoded, where the temporal envelope of the acoustic signal is preserved, while the spectral information is substantially degraded).

Thalamic and parietal brain morphology predicts auditory category learning.

Auditory categorization is a vital skill involving the attribution of meaning to acoustic events, engaging domain-specific (i.e., auditory) as well as domain-general (e.

The brain dynamics of rapid perceptual adaptation to adverse listening conditions.

Listeners show a remarkable ability to quickly adjust to degraded speech input. Here, we aimed to identify the neural mechanisms of such short-term perceptual adaptation. In a sparse-sampling, cardiac-gated functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) acquisition, human listeners heard and repeated back 4-band-vocoded sentences (in which the temporal envelope of the acoustic signal is preserved, while spectral information is highly degraded).

Auditory skills and brain morphology predict individual differences in adaptation to degraded speech.

Noise-vocoded speech is a spectrally highly degraded signal, but it preserves the temporal envelope of speech. Listeners vary considerably in their ability to adapt to this degraded speech signal. Here, we hypothesised that individual differences in adaptation to vocoded speech should be predictable by non-speech auditory, cognitive, and neuroanatomical factors.