Investigation of the neural discrimination of acoustic characteristics of speech sounds in normal-hearing individuals through Frequency-following Response (FFR).

Autor: Rocha-Muniz CN; Departamento de Fisioterapia, Fonoaudiologia e Terapia Ocupacional, Faculdade de Medicina, Universidade de São Paulo - USP - São Paulo (SP), Brasil.; Faculdade de Ciências Médicas da Santa Casa de São Paulo - São Paulo (SP), Brasil., Schochat E; Departamento de Fisioterapia, Fonoaudiologia e Terapia Ocupacional, Faculdade de Medicina, Universidade de São Paulo - USP - São Paulo (SP), Brasil.
Jazyk: Portuguese; English
Zdroj: CoDAS [Codas] 2021 Apr 21; Vol. 33 (1), pp. e20180324. Date of Electronic Publication: 2021 Apr 21 (Print Publication: 2021).
DOI: 10.1590/2317-1782/20202018324
Abstrakt: Purpose: To evaluate how the auditory pathways encode and discriminate the plosive syllables [ga], [da] and [ba] using the auditory evoked Frequency-following Response (FFR) in children with typical development.
Methods: Twenty children aged 6-12 years were evaluated using the FFR for the [ga], [da] and [ba] stimuli. The stimuli were composed of six formants and were differentiated in the F2 to F3 transition (transient portion). The other formants were identical in the three syllables (sustained portion). The latencies of the 16 waves of the transient portion (<70ms) and of the 21 waves of the sustained portion (90-160ms) of the stimuli were analyzed in the neural responses obtained for each of the syllables.
Results: The transient portion latencies were different in the three syllables, indicating a distinction in the acoustic characteristics of these syllables through their neural representations. In addition, the transient portion latencies progressively increased in the following order: [ga] <[da] <[ba], whereas no significant differences were observed in the sustained portion.
Conclusion: The FFR proved to be an efficient tool to investigate the subcortical acoustic differences in speech sounds, since it demonstrated different electrophysiological responses for the three evoked syllables. Changes in latency were observed in the transient portion (consonants) but not in the sustained portion (vowels) for the three stimuli. These results indicate the neural ability to distinguish between acoustic characteristics of the [ga], [da] and [ba] stimuli.
Databáze: MEDLINE