title: Temporal dynamics of contingency extraction from tonal and verbal auditory sequences.
abstract: Consecutive sound events are often to some degree predictive of each other. Here we investigated the brain's capacity to detect contingencies between consecutive sounds by means of electroencephalography (EEG) during passive listening. Contingencies were embedded either within tonal or verbal stimuli. Contingency extraction was measured indirectly via the elicitation of the mismatch negativity (MMN) component of the event-related potential (ERP) by contingency violations. MMN results indicate that structurally identical forms of predictability can be extracted from both tonal and verbal stimuli. We also found similar generators to underlie the processing of contingency violations across stimulus types, as well as similar performance in an active-listening follow-up test. However, the process of passive contingency extraction was considerably slower (twice as many rule exemplars were needed) for verbal than for tonal stimuli These results suggest caution in transferring findings on complex predictive regularity processing obtained with tonal stimuli directly to the speech domain.
authors.affiliation: Auditory Psychophysiology Lab, Department of Psychology, Cluster of Excellence "Hearing4all", European Medical School, Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg, D-26111 Oldenburg, Germany; Institute of Psychology, University of Leipzig, D-04103 Leipzig, Germany. Electronic address: alexandra.bendixen@uni-oldenburg.de.
authors.forename: Alexandra
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Bendixen
authors.affiliation: School of Psychological Sciences, University of Manchester, M13 9PL Manchester, UK; Department of Neuropsychology, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, D-04103 Leipzig, Germany. Electronic address: michael.schwartze@manchester.ac.uk.
authors.forename: Michael
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Schwartze
authors.affiliation: School of Psychological Sciences, University of Manchester, M13 9PL Manchester, UK; Department of Neuropsychology, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, D-04103 Leipzig, Germany. Electronic address: sonja.kotz@manchester.ac.uk.
authors.forename: Sonja A
authors.initials: SA
authors.lastname: Kotz
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000328:Adult; D001307:Auditory Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology; D001931:Brain Mapping; D004569:Electroencephalography; D005071:Evoked Potentials; D005072:Evoked Potentials, Auditory / Q000502:physiology; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D013016:Sound; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D013997:Time Factors; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Brain activity; Contingency learning; Deviance detection; Event-related potential (ERP); Language; Mismatch negativity (MMN); Predictive coding; Regularity; Speech