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Brainstem encoding of speech and musical stimuli in congenital amusia: evidence from Cantonese speakers

Liu, F; Maggu, AR; Lau, JCY; Wong, PCM; (2015) Brainstem encoding of speech and musical stimuli in congenital amusia: evidence from Cantonese speakers. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience , 8 , Article 1029. 10.3389/fnhum.2014.01029. Green open access

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Abstract

Congenital amusia is a neurodevelopmental disorder of musical processing that also impacts subtle aspects of speech processing. It remains debated at what stage(s) of auditory processing deficits in amusia arise. In this study, we investigated whether amusia originates from impaired subcortical encoding of speech (in quiet and noise) and musical sounds in the brainstem. Fourteen Cantonese-speaking amusics and 14 matched controls passively listened to six Cantonese lexical tones in quiet, two Cantonese tones in noise (signal-to-noise ratios at 0 and 20 dB), and two cello tones in quiet while their frequency-following responses (FFRs) to these tones were recorded. All participants also completed a behavioral lexical tone identification task. The results indicated normal brainstem encoding of pitch in speech (in quiet and noise) and musical stimuli in amusics relative to controls, as measured by FFR pitch strength, pitch error, and stimulus-to-response correlation. There was also no group difference in neural conduction time or FFR amplitudes. Both groups demonstrated better FFRs to speech (in quiet and noise) than to musical stimuli. However, a significant group difference was observed for tone identification, with amusics showing significantly lower accuracy than controls. Analysis of the tone confusion matrices suggested that amusics were more likely than controls to confuse between tones that shared similar acoustic features. Interestingly, this deficit in lexical tone identification was not coupled with brainstem abnormality for either speech or musical stimuli. Together, our results suggest that the amusic brainstem is not functioning abnormally, although higher-order linguistic pitch processing is impaired in amusia. This finding has significant implications for theories of central auditory processing, requiring further investigations into how different stages of auditory processing interact in the human brain.

Type: Article
Title: Brainstem encoding of speech and musical stimuli in congenital amusia: evidence from Cantonese speakers
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.3389/fnhum.2014.01029
Publisher version: http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2014.01029
Additional information: Copyright © 2015 Liu, Maggu, Lau and Wong. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
Keywords: Congenital amusia, brainstem, pitch, lexical/musical tone, speech in noise, Cantonese, frequency-following response (FFR).
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences
URI: https://discovery-pp.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1463165
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