Noise affects auditory and linguistic processing differently: an MEG study

• Published in: Neuroreport Vol. 11; no. 2; pp. 227 - 230
• Main Authors: Herrmann, C S, Oertel, U, Wang, Y, Maess, B, Friederici, A D
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Hagerstown, MD Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, Inc 07-02-2000; Lippincott Williams and Wilkins
• Subjects: Acoustic Stimulation; Adult; Analysis of Variance; Auditory Perception - physiology; Biological and medical sciences; Brain Mapping; Electroencephalography; Evoked Potentials - physiology; Female; Functional Laterality; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Humans; Language; Magnetoencephalography; Male; Natural Language Processing; Noise; Parietal Lobe - physiology; Production and perception of spoken language; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychology. Psychophysiology; Semantics; Speech Perception - physiology; Time Factors; Human; Acoustic stimulus; Methodology; Magnetoencephalography; Information processing; White noise; Cognition; Measurement method; Experimental study; Syntax
• ISSN: 0959-4965; 1473-558X
• DOI: 10.1097/00001756-200002070-00001

We investigated the influence of noise on brain responses to spoken sentences in MEG. Sixteen subjects had to listen to acoustically presented sentences and judge their syntactic correctness. Sentences were either presented on a silent background or with noise. Noise had differential effects on early auditory and syntactic processes. While noise affected early auditory processes only in the right hemisphere, noise had a general effect on syntactical processes. The evoked responses to syntactic violations compared with correct sentences, namely an early left anterior negativity, were significantly suppressed when noise was present. The noise suppression effect, however, was not lateralized.