Faculty Collaboration Database

Attentional and linguistic interactions in speech perception. Neuroimage 2008 Feb 01;39(3):1444-56

Date

11/13/2007

Pubmed ID

17996463

Pubmed Central ID

PMC2268216

DOI

10.1016/j.neuroimage.2007.09.052

Scopus ID

2-s2.0-38049011874 (requires institutional sign-in at Scopus site)   75 Citations

Abstract

The role of attention in speech comprehension is not well understood. We used fMRI to study the neural correlates of auditory word, pseudoword, and nonspeech (spectrally rotated speech) perception during a bimodal (auditory, visual) selective attention task. In three conditions, Attend Auditory (ignore visual), Ignore Auditory (attend visual), and Visual (no auditory stimulation), 28 subjects performed a one-back matching task in the assigned attended modality. The visual task, attending to rapidly presented Japanese characters, was designed to be highly demanding in order to prevent attention to the simultaneously presented auditory stimuli. Regardless of stimulus type, attention to the auditory channel enhanced activation by the auditory stimuli (Attend Auditory>Ignore Auditory) in bilateral posterior superior temporal regions and left inferior frontal cortex. Across attentional conditions, there were main effects of speech processing (word+pseudoword>rotated speech) in left orbitofrontal cortex and several posterior right hemisphere regions, though these areas also showed strong interactions with attention (larger speech effects in the Attend Auditory than in the Ignore Auditory condition) and no significant speech effects in the Ignore Auditory condition. Several other regions, including the postcentral gyri, left supramarginal gyrus, and temporal lobes bilaterally, showed similar interactions due to the presence of speech effects only in the Attend Auditory condition. Main effects of lexicality (word>pseudoword) were isolated to a small region of the left lateral prefrontal cortex. Examination of this region showed significant word>pseudoword activation only in the Attend Auditory condition. Several other brain regions, including left ventromedial frontal lobe, left dorsal prefrontal cortex, and left middle temporal gyrus, showed Attention x Lexicality interactions due to the presence of lexical activation only in the Attend Auditory condition. These results support a model in which neutral speech presented in an unattended sensory channel undergoes relatively little processing beyond the early perceptual level. Specifically, processing of phonetic and lexical-semantic information appears to be very limited in such circumstances, consistent with prior behavioral studies.

Author List

Sabri M, Binder JR, Desai R, Medler DA, Leitl MD, Liebenthal E

Author

Jeffrey R. Binder MD Professor in the Neurology department at Medical College of Wisconsin

MESH terms used to index this publication - Major topics in bold

Acoustic Stimulation
Adult
Attention
Female
Humans
Image Processing, Computer-Assisted
Magnetic Resonance Imaging
Male
Photic Stimulation
Psycholinguistics
Psychomotor Performance
Reading
Speech Perception
Visual Perception