Title
Biasing the Perception of Spoken Words with Transcranial Alternating Current Stimulation.
Abstract
<para xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Recent neuroimaging evidence suggests that the frequency of entrained oscillations in auditory cortices influences the perceived duration of speech segments, impacting word perception [Kösem, A., Bosker, H. R., Takashima, A., Meyer, A., Jensen, O., &amp; Hagoort, P. Neural entrainment determines the words we hear. <italic toggle="yes">Current Biology</italic>, <italic toggle="yes">28</italic>, 2867–2875, 2018]. We further tested the causal influence of neural entrainment frequency during speech processing, by manipulating entrainment with continuous transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) at distinct oscillatory frequencies (3 and 5.5 Hz) above the auditory cortices. Dutch participants listened to speech and were asked to report their percept of a target Dutch word, which contained a vowel with an ambiguous duration. Target words were presented either in isolation (first experiment) or at the end of spoken sentences (second experiment). We predicted that the tACS frequency would influence neural entrainment and therewith how speech is perceptually sampled, leading to a perceptual overestimation or underestimation of the vowel's duration. Whereas results from Experiment 1 did not confirm this prediction, results from Experiment 2 suggested a small effect of tACS frequency on target word perception: Faster tACS leads to more long-vowel word percepts, in line with the previous neuroimaging findings. Importantly, the difference in word perception induced by the different tACS frequencies was significantly larger in Experiment 1 versus Experiment 2, suggesting that the impact of tACS is dependent on the sensory context. tACS may have a stronger effect on spoken word perception when the words are presented in continuous speech as compared to when they are isolated, potentially because prior (stimulus-induced) entrainment of brain oscillations might be a prerequisite for tACS to be effective.</para>
Year
DOI
Venue
2020
10.1162/jocn_a_01579
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
DocType
Volume
Issue
Journal
32
8
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
0898-929X
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Anne Kösem192.17
Hans Rutger Bosker200.34
Ole Jensen324330.05
Peter Hagoort430466.52
L. Riecke5306.36