A colleague just brought me a mug of coffee in the middle of a talk in the session I am co-chairing and I have never felt fancier.

#AROMWM #ARO2023

Starting now in Crystal DE: Non-sensory processes in speech perception. Thread of talks below.

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Senior lab member Dushyanthi Karunathilake totally nails her first ever slide presentation at an in-person international conference (Progression of Acoustic, Phonemic, Lexical and Sentential Neural Features Emerge for Different Speech Listening). Can’t wait for her poster presentation this afternoon (poster MO211).
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Next Dushyanthi Karunathilake talking about hierarchical levels of speech representation (phonemes up through pragmatics). Results from MEG study with 1-minute passages (speech modulated noise, non-words, scrambled words, narrative).

Estimated multiple TRFs simultaneously (long list of features: surprisal, word onset, cohort entropy, phoneme onset, etc.).

Acoustic features are processed for all, but linguistic features encoded for speech. Lower-level (acoustic features: e.g. envelope) are more right lateralized, languagey features (surprisal) left lateralized. Phoneme surprisal and cohort entropy bilateral.

For TRFs:

-acoustic envelope onset: speech > noise responses (doesn't distinguish between speech conditions). Envelope (overall, not onset) speech > noise again, but distinguishes scrambled vs narrative.

-cohort entropy shows interesting differences across condition. (lots of results, I can't keep up)

Using these results to look at timing of top-down and bottom-up mechanisms 👍

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Up now: Kelsey Mankel. As part of a larger comprehensive study, did a spatial attention story listening task (+EEG and pupillometry). Visual cues told participants to listen to the left or right speaker.

Historical challenge getting ERPs from natural speech. Use chirped speech (aka "cheech") that can give standard ERPs (Backer et al., 2019 J Neurophysiology).

Cheech ERPs (cherps? <- my term) affected by attention (differ target vs distractor).

N400 responses to color words (targets) in the midst of this task.

Brain-behavior relationships also present, e.g., with subjective measurements of listening effort. Lots of other correlations that I wasn't able to capture fast enough.

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Now Gavin Bidelman on looking at brainstem activity during categorical perception using EEG.

Background: Auditory cortex shows categorical responses in ERPs.

In the past, used FFR to look at subcortical categorical responses. Prior work (Bidelman et al. 2013) suggested not.

Newer work: develop active task that can be used for studying FFR (most FFR studies are passive). Used perceptual warping and categorization task.

-2-3x enhancement of F0 in FFR during active relative to passive
listening
-Category ends seem more strongly represented than midpoints during active perception

Conclusion: FFR more than "just" an acoustic perception, reflects attention and categorical representations

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Sara Carta now talking about phonetic features in attended and ignored speech.

They used a multi-speaker array to present background noise, target speech, and masker speech, collecting data using EEG. Expect phonetic features will be better represented in target than in masker based on listener attention.

This is what they found, ✅

Also, differential coding for phoneme onsets. (Accounting for "acoustic" information using spectrogram and half-wave spectrogram in the model.)

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@jpeelle can confirm that it was a great talk #AROMWM #ARO2023

First up: Jaime Hannah, looking at a meta analysis looking at brain activity associated with effortful listening, and potential overlap with regions involved in other processes (e.g., inhibition, working memory).

They performed three ALE meta analyses: effortful listening, inhibition, working memory.

Speech-in-noise: anterior insula, cingulate (aka cingulo-opercular network), STG;

Inhibition (stroop incongruent>neutral): also overlaps cingulo-opercular

Working memory (n-back): also overlaps cingulo-opercular

Conclusion: suggestive of shared cognitive functions between speech-in-noise, working memory, and inhibition

(Side note: every time someone uses a figure from one of my papers I am humbled, thrilled, and self-conscious about my artistic skills!)

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First up: Morning session on Speech Perception in Oceans 1-4. Topics near and dear to my heart. #AROMWM #ARO2023

Happy Monday from #AROMWM! I am going to try to do a better job tooting from the conference today, in part because I was talking up Mastodon to a group of trainees yesterday. Will try my very best to keep the toots unlisted so as not to clog your feed (unless you follow me, in which case, you asked for it).

#ARO2023

At the spARO session on networking someone commented they were much more likely to have someone come up and comment on a current paper than something from social media.

So far I’ve had two unsolicited social media comments and one paper comment. I think I know where my influence lies. 😂

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Instructions: You can provide your presentation in either Powerpoint or Keynote format

Translation: We only accept presentations in Powerpoint

😂​

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@adykstra Thanks! I also invite #AROMWM folks to check out Dushyanthi Karunathilake on Mon (talk 9:15am, “Progression of Acoustic, Phonemic, Lexical and Sentential Neural Features Emerge for Different Speech Listening” & afternoon poster “Neural Tracking Measures of Speech Intelligibility: Manipulating Intelligibility While Keeping Acoustics Unchanged”) and Stefanie Kuchinsky Wed 11am (“Interactions Between Pre-Stimulus and Stimulus-Evoked Pupil Dilation Indices of Listening Engagement”).

I was about to tell someone I see on Mastodon, and will also see at a conference later this month: "Pretty soon we can toot at each other in person!" but I just couldn't do it.

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