Speech perception in amusia. (360G-Wellcome-109719_Z_15_Z)

£98,068

Amusia is a disorder characterized by impaired pitch discrimination, which interferes with both music and speech perception in the laboratory. However, paradoxically, amusics do not report problems with speech perception in everyday life. We hypothesize that amusics compensate for their deficit by focusing on durational information in speech, which provides cues to some of the same structural elements marked by pitch changes. Here we propose to develop a behavioural and functional magnetic reson ance imaging battery designed to test this compensatory hypothesis. Lexical stress perception, prosody perception, and speech-in-noise perception tested will be tested in three different conditions: with unaltered stimuli, with only pitch cues, and with only durational cues. We predict that amusics will be impaired only on the conditions containing only pitch cues. We further predict that in amusics the pattern of activation elicited when both pitch and duration cues are present will closely res emble the pattern when only durational cues are present, while in control subjects pitch- and duration-tracking networks will be equally represented. The development of this testing paradigm would enable evaluation of pitch and duration processing during speech perception in a variety of populations.

Where is this data from?

This data was originally published by The Wellcome Trust. If you see something about your organisation or the funding it has received on this page that doesn't look right you can submit a grantee amendment request. You can hover over codes from standard codelists to see the user-friendly name provided by 360Giving.

Grant Details

Amount Awarded 98068
Applicant Surname Tierney
Approval Committee ERG3 Cognitive Neuroscience and Mental Health
Award Date 2015-09-17T00:00:00+00:00
Financial Year 2014/15
Grant Programme: Title Seed Award in Science
Internal ID 109719/Z/15/Z
Lead Applicant Dr Adam Tierney
Partnership Value 98068
Planned Dates: End Date 2018-01-29T00:00:00+00:00
Planned Dates: Start Date 2016-08-01T00:00:00+00:00
Recipient Org: Country United Kingdom
Region Greater London