Society for Neuroscience features BME’s Oded Ghitza
A paper by BME’s Oded Ghitza and his colleagues has been selected for the eNeuro Featured Research page by the Society for Neuroscience. Acoustically Driven Cortical Delta Oscillations Underpin Prosodic Chunking represents new research on acoustic processing.
Oded Ghitza and his colleagues Johanna Rimmele and David Poeppel show that delta neural oscillations may help the brain tune in to the phrase-level organization of speech. This discovery linking brain rhythms to speech is highlighted this month in the prestigious journal, eNeuro.
According to oscillation-based models of speech perception, theta oscillators are at the core of a cortical computational principle, by which speech segmentation at the syllabic scale is performed by the oscillators synchronizing to the input signal. The authors demonstrate that at the phrasal time scale delta oscillators could play an analogous role. They found that when the rate of phrase-size speech chunks is inside compared to outside the delta range, behavioral performance is increased and cortical delta periodicities are elicited. The findings suggest that delta oscillators perform speech segmentation at the phrasal-scale, with the delta cycles constituting phrase-sized windows.
This work was funded by the Max-Planck-Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, supported by CLaME Max Planck NYU Center for Language Music and Emotion, and by a research grant from the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research.
The figure below shows three cortical regions associated with speech-perception related functions (left, middle and right columns). The neuroimaging (MEG) data show that when the speech rate is inside the delta range strong cortical delta periodicities are elicited (upper row). Delta periodicities diminish when the speech rate is outside the delta range (lower row).
