Brain substrates of perceived spatial separation between speech sources under simulated reverberant listening conditions in schizophrenia

Abstract

Introducing the PSS listening condition efficiently reveals both the brain substrates underlying schizophrenia-related speech-recognition deficits against informational masking and the schizophrenia-related neural compensatory strategy for impaired SPL functions.

Activation and Functional Connectivity of the Left Inferior Temporal Gyrus during Visual Speech Priming in Healthy Listeners and Listeners with Schizophrenia

“…Patients with schizophrenia were diagnosed with the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV (SCID-DSM-IV) (First et al, 1997), and were recruited in the Affiliated Brain (Huiai) Hospital of Guangzhou Medical University with the recruiting criteria used previously (Wu et al, 2012; Zheng et al, 2016). Patients with diagnoses of schizoaffective or other psychotic disorders were not included.…”

“…Demographically matched healthy participants were recruited from the community around the hospital with the recruiting criteria used previously (Wu et al, 2012; Zheng et al, 2016). They were telephone-interviewed first and then those who passed the interview were screened with the SCID-DSM-IV as used for patient participants.…”

“…Thus, the stimulus-evoked hemodynamic responses peaked during the scanning period (Wild et al, 2012; Zheng et al, 2016). …”

“…Recognizing target speech under noisy “cocktail-party” conditions with multiple-people talking is one of the most difficult tasks where listeners need to facilitate the perceptual segregation between target speech and masking speech using some perceptual and/or cognitive cues (Freyman et al, 2004; Helfer and Freyman, 2005, 2009; Schneider et al, 2007; Wu et al, 2012, 2013a,b; Zheng et al, 2016). Lipreading is one of the cues that can help people follow the target-speech stream of the attended speaker under “cocktail-party” conditions (Helfer and Freyman, 2005; Wu et al, 2013a,b).…”

“…The unmasking effect of VSP is normally based on the incorporation of several perceptual/cognitive processes, including the processing of speech information contained in lipreading, working memory of lipreading information, audiovisual integration during the co-presentation of the target speech and the masking speech, selective attention on target speech, and suppression of irrelevant masking signals (Wu et al, 2013a). People with schizophrenia, however, show impaired ability of using the temporally pre-presented lip-reading cue to improve target-speech identification against speech masking (Wu et al, 2013b), possibly suggesting a combined effect of working-memory deficits (Forbes et al, 2009), cross-modal-integration deficits (Ross et al, 2007; Wu et al, 2013b), and object-oriented-attention deficits (Zheng et al, 2016; Wu et al, 2016). …”