Dear Users

Today (4-5 pm in YNiC) there will be a project proposal presentation by Mark Hymers. The title of the project is "The functional organisation of the recognition of speech and music". Please see below for the talk abstract.

Everyone is welcome to attend and refreshments will be provided after the talk.

Best wishes Rebecca

****************************************************************** Mark Hymers and Rebecca Millman

Abstract: There is debate in the literature over the extent to which speech and music perception recruits shared computational systems (e.g. Patel, 2003; Peretz and Zatorre, 2005; Fedorenko et al., 2009; Rogalsky et al., 2011). The proposed study will use functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and “perceptual pop-out” to determine the neural basis of both speech and music recognition. Perceptual pop-out is achieved by presenting a degraded/distorted musical or speech sound that appears meaningless when heard for the first time but is easily recognisable after hearing an undegraded/undistorted version of the same sound. Perceptual pop-put has been used in previous studies of speech recognition (e.g. Liebenthal et al., 2003; Giraud et al., 2004; Möttönen et al., 2006) but not, to our knowledge, in studies of melody recognition. In this study we will take advantage of the effect of perceptual pop-out for both music (known melodies) and speech (IEEE sentences) stimuli to control for acoustical differences in the musical and speech stimuli. This approach will allow us to determine the extent of organisational overlap in the representation of music and speech recognition within the same group of participants.