Daniele Schön

• French Institute of Health and Medical Research

Purpose Prelingual deaf children with cochlear implants show lower digit span test scores compared to normal-hearing peers, suggesting a working memory impairment. To pinpoint more precisely the subprocesses responsible for this impairment, we designed a sequence reproduction task with varying length (two to six stimuli), modality (auditory or visu...

Alpha oscillations in the auditory cortex have been associated with attention and the suppression of irrelevant information. However, their anatomical organization and interaction with other neural processes remain unclear. Do alpha oscillations function as a local mechanism within most neural sources to regulate their internal excitation/inhibitio...

Understanding the complex neural mechanisms underlying speech and music perception remains a multifaceted challenge. In this study, we investigated neural dynamics using human intracranial recordings. Employing a novel approach based on low-dimensional reduction techniques, the Manifold Density Flow (MDF), we quantified the complexity of brain dyna...

Our use of language, which is profoundly social in nature, essentially takes place in interactive contexts and is shaped by precise coordination dynamics that interlocutors must observe. Thus language interaction is high demanding on fast adjustment of speech production. Here, we developed a real-time coupled-oscillators virtual partner that allows...

Our use of language, which is profoundly social in nature, essentially takes place in interactive contexts and is shaped by precise coordination dynamics that interlocutors must observe. Thus language interaction is high demanding on fast adjustment of speech production. Here, we developed a real-time coupled-oscillators virtual partner that allows...

Background Perceptual and speech production abilities of children with cochlear implants (CIs) are usually tested by word and sentence repetition or naming tests. However, these tests are quite far apart from daily life linguistic contexts. Aim Here, we describe a way of investigating the link between language comprehension and anticipatory verbal...

To what extent does speech and music processing rely on domain-specific and domain-general neural networks? Using whole-brain intracranial EEG recordings in 18 epilepsy patients listening to natural, continuous speech or music, we investigated the presence of frequency-specific and network-level brain activity. We combined it with a statistical app...

To what extent does speech and music processing rely on domain-specific and domain-general neural networks? Using whole-brain intracranial EEG recordings in 18 epilepsy patients listening to natural, continuous speech or music, we investigated the presence of frequency-specific and network-level brain activity. We combined it with a statistical app...

Why do humans spontaneously dance to music? To test the hypothesis that motor dynamics reflect predictive timing during music listening, we created melodies with varying degrees of rhythmic predictability (syncopation) and asked participants to rate their wanting-to-move (groove) experience. Degree of syncopation and groove ratings are quadraticall...

To what extent does speech and music processing rely on domain-specific and domain-general neural networks? Using whole-brain intracranial EEG recordings in 18 epilepsy patients listening to natural, continuous speech or music, we investigated the presence of frequency-specific and network-level brain activity. We combined it with a statistical app...

To what extent does speech and music processing rely on domain-specific and domain-general neural networks? Using whole-brain intracranial EEG recordings in 18 epilepsy patients listening to natural, continuous speech or music, we investigated the presence of frequency-specific and network-level brain activity. We combined it with a statistical app...

Objectives To assess hippocampal function during stereoelectroencephalography (SEEG) investigations through the study of the medial temporal lobe event-related potential (ERP) MTL-P300. Methods We recorded the MTL-P300 during a visual oddball task, using hippocampal electrodes implanted for SEEG in 71 patients, in a preoperative epilepsy investiga...

Early sensory deprivation allows assessing the extent of reorganisation of cognitive functions, well beyond sensory processing. As such, it is a good model to explore the links between sensory experience and cognitive functions. One of these functions, statistical learning – the ability to extract and use regularities present in the environment – i...

Statistical learning has been proposed as a mechanism to structure and segment the continuous flow of information in several sensory modalities. Previous studies proposed that the medial temporal lobe, and in particular the hippocampus, may be crucial to parse the stream in the visual modality. However, the involvement of the hippocampus in auditor...

Conversation represents a considerable amount of the daily language usage and plays an important role in language acquisition. In conversation, listeners simultaneously process their interlocutor’s turn and prepare their own next turn. As such the turn-taking dynamics heavily relies on prediction. In other words, listeners avail prior knowledge to...

Statistical learning has been proposed as a mechanism to structure and segment the continuous flow of information in several sensory modalities. Previous studies proposed that the medial temporal lobe, and in particular the hippocampus, may be crucial to parse the stream in the visual modality. However, the involvement of the hippocampus in auditor...

Cortical oscillations have been proposed to play a functional role in speech and music perception, attentional selection, and working memory, via the mechanism of neural entrainment. One of the properties of neural entrainment that is often taken for granted is that its modulatory effect on ongoing oscillations outlasts rhythmic stimulation. We tes...

It is poorly known whether musical training is associated with improvements in general cognitive abilities, such as statistical learning (SL). In standard SL paradigms, musicians have shown better performances than nonmusicians. However, this advantage could be due to differences in auditory discrimination, in memory or truly in the ability to lear...

While electrically-evoked auditory brainstem response (eABR) thresholds for low-rate pulse trains correlate well with behavioral thresholds measured at the same rate, the correlation is much weaker with behavioral thresholds measured at high rates, such as used clinically. This implies that eABRs to low-rate stimuli cannot be reliably used for obje...

Objectives: Children with hearing loss (HL), in spite of early cochlear implantation, often struggle considerably with language acquisition. Previous research has shown a benefit of rhythmic training on linguistic skills in children with HL, suggesting that improving rhythmic capacities could help attenuating language difficulties. However, little...

Despite the overall success of cochlear implantation, language outcomes remain suboptimal and subject to large inter-individual variability. Early auditory rehabilitation techniques have mostly focused on low-level sensory abilities. However, a new body of literature suggests that cognitive operations are critical for auditory perception remediatio...

Speech perception is mediated by both left and right auditory cortices but with differential sensitivity to specific acoustic information contained in the speech signal. A detailed description of this functional asymmetry is missing, and the underlying models are widely debated. We analyzed cortical responses from 96 epilepsy patients with electrod...

When listening to temporally regular rhythms, most people are able to extract the beat. Evidence suggests that the neural mechanism underlying this ability is the phase alignment of endogenous oscillations to the external stimulus, allowing for the prediction of upcoming events (i.e., dynamic attending). Relatedly, individuals with dyslexia may hav...

Purpose In this study, we investigate temporal adaptation capacities of children with normal hearing and children with cochlear implants and/or hearing aids during verbal exchange. We also address the question of the efficiency of a rhythmic training on temporal adaptation during speech interaction in children with hearing loss. Method We recorded...

Rhythmic stimulation is a powerful tool to improve temporal prediction and parsing of the auditory signal. However, for long duration of stimulation, the rhythmic and repetitive aspects of music have often been associated to a trance state. In this study we conceived an auditory monitoring task that allows tracking changes of psychophysical auditor...

Speech perception is mediated by both left and right auditory cortices, but with differential sensitivity to specific acoustic information contained in the speech signal. A detailed description of this functional asymmetry is missing, and the underlying models are widely debated. We analyzed cortical responses from 96 epilepsy patients with electro...

While many studies have demonstrated the relationship between musical rhythm and speech prosody, this has been rarely addressed in the context of second language (L2) acquisition. Here, we investigated whether musical rhythmic skills and the production of L2 speech prosody are predictive of one another. We tested both musical and linguistic rhythmi...

Growing evidence shows that music and language experience affect the neural processing of speech sounds throughout the auditory system. Recent work mainly focused on the benefits induced by musical practice on the processing of native language or tonal foreign language, which rely on pitch processing. The aim of the present study was to take this r...

Musical rhythm positively impacts on subsequent speech processing. However, the neural mechanisms underlying this phenomenon are so far unclear. We investigated whether carryover effects from a preceding musical cue to a speech stimulus result from a continuation of neural phase entrainment to periodicities that are present in both music and speech...

This study investigates temporal adaptation in speech interaction in children with normal hearing and in children with cochlear implants (CIs) and/or hearing aids (HAs). We also address the question of whether musical rhythmic training can improve these skills in children with hearing loss (HL). Children named pictures presented on the screen in al...

Material and methods: Nineteen prelingually unilateral cochlear implanted children without additional handicap (4 to 10 year-olds) were recruited. The four main auditory cognitive processing (identification, discrimination, ASA and auditory memory) were stimulated and trained in the Experimental Group (EG) using Sound in Hands. The EG followed 20...

This event-related potential study examined whether French listeners use stress at a phonological level when discriminating between stressed and unstressed words in their language. Participants heard five words and made same/different decisions about the final word (male voice) with respect to the four preceding words (different female voices). Com...

This event-related potential study examined whether French listeners use stress at a phonological level when discriminating between stressed and unstressed words in their language. Participants heard five words and made same/different decisions about the final word (male voice) with respect to the four preceding words (different female voices). Com...

There is some evidence for a role of music training in boosting phonological awareness, word segmentation, working memory, as well as reading abilities in children with typical development. Poor performance in tasks requiring temporal processing, rhythm perception and sensorimotor synchronization seems to be a crucial factor underlying dyslexia in...

This paper brings together different perspectives on the investigation and understanding of temporal processing and temporal expectations. We aim to bridge different temporal deficit hypotheses in dyslexia, dysphasia, or deafness in a larger framework, taking into account multiple nested temporal scales. We present data testing the hypothesis that...

Converging evidence points to a link between anxiety proneness and altered emotional functioning, including threat-related biases in selective attention and higher susceptibility to emotionally ambiguous stimuli. However, during these complex emotional situations, it remains unclear how trait anxiety affects the engagement of the prefrontal emotion...

Cet article décrit un programme de recherche en neurosémiotique. L’idée principale consiste à proposer la composante N400 du potentiel évoqué comme «arbitre empirique » entre deux paradigmes de donation de sens : le paradigme fonctionnaliste des sciences cognitives, décrivant la séquence d’accès au lexique, et un paradigme réunissant le structurali...

The present study investigated whether a temporal hierarchical structure favors implicit learning. An artificial pitch grammar implemented with a set of tones was presented in two different temporal contexts, notably with either a strongly metrical structure or an isochronous structure. According to the Dynamic Attending Theory, external temporal r...

Rhythmic entrainment is an important component of emotion induction by music, but brain circuits recruited during spontaneous entrainment of attention by music and the influence of the subjective emotional feelings evoked by music remain still largely unresolved. In this study we used fMRI to test whether the metric structure of music entrains brai...

The cortico-limbic system is critically involved in emotional responses and resulting adaptive behaviors. Within this circuit, complementary regions are believed to be involved in either the appraisal or the regulation of affective state. However, the respective contribution of these bottom-up and top-down mechanisms during emotion processing remai...

Objective: Following recent findings that rhythmic priming can enhance speech perception, the aim of this experiment was to investigate whether this extends to speech production. Method: The authors measured the influence of rhythmic priming on phonological production abilities in 14 hearing impaired children with hearing devices. Children had t...

The musician's brain is considered as a good model of brain plasticity as musical training is known to modify auditory perception and related cortical organization. Here, we show that music-related modifications can also extend beyond motor and auditory processing and generalize (transfer) to speech processing. Previous studies have shown that adul...

Rhythm organizes events in time and plays a major role in music, but also in the phonology and prosody of a language. Interestingly, children with developmental dyslexia—a learning disability that affects reading acquisition despite normal intelligence and adequate education—have a poor rhythmic perception. It has been suggested that an accurate pe...

Mild traumatic brain injury (MTBI) has a high incidence and sometimes causes post-concussion syndrome (PCS). Modifications in music listening appear to be a complaint of patients suffering from PCS. In this article, we characterize these changes and evaluate them using both objective and subjective data. After a complete neuropsychological, morphol...

When we direct attentional resources to a certain point in time, expectation and preparedness is heightened and behavior is, as a result, more efficient. This future-oriented attending can be guided either voluntarily, by externally defined cues, or implicitly, by perceived temporal regularities. Inspired by dynamic attending theory, our aim was to...

While neuronal desynchronization in the mu ((≈)10Hz) and beta ((≈)20Hz) frequency bands has long been known to be an EEG index of sensorimotor activity, this method has rarely been employed to study auditory perception. In the present study, we measured mu and beta event-related desynchronisation (ERD) while participants were asked to listen to voc...

Recent evidence has reported that the motor system has a role in speech or emotional vocalization discrimination. In the present study we investigated the involvement of the larynx motor representation in singing perception. Twenty-one non-musicians listened to short tones sung by a human voice or played by a machine and performed a categorization...

Recognition memory for details of musical phrases (discrimination between targets and similar lures) improves for up to 15 s following the presentation of a target, during continuous listening to the ongoing piece. This is attributable to binding of stimulus features during that time interval. The ongoing-listening paradigm is an ecologically valid...

Objective: Vocal accuracy of a sung performance can be evaluated by two methods: acoustic analyses and subjective judgments. Acoustic analyses have been presented as a more reliable solution but both methods are still used for the evaluation of singing voice accuracy. This article presents a first time direct comparison of these methods. Methods:...

Here we present two experiments investigating the implicit orienting of attention over time by entrainment to an auditory rhythmic stimulus. In the first experiment, participants carried out a detection and discrimination tasks with auditory and visual targets while listening to an isochronous, auditory sequence, which acted as the entraining stimu...

Reviews the book, Brain & Music by Stefan Koelsch (2012). Although brain and music are represented separately on the cover, Stefan Koelsch succeeds in the challenge of presenting more than 300 pages of state-of-the-art and well-structured information on the way the brain processes music, and, to a lesser extent, the way music in turn shapes the bra...

Classification of medical images in multi-subjects settings is a difficult challenge due to the variability that exists between individuals. Here we introduce a new graph-based framework designed to deal with inter-subject functional variability present in fMRI data. A graphical model is constructed to encode the functional, geometric and structura...

The role of music training in fostering brain plasticity and developing high cognitive skills, notably linguistic abilities, is of great interest from both a scientific and a societal perspective. Here, we report results of a longitudinal study over 2 years using both behavioral and electrophysiological measures and a test-training-retest procedure...

When we observe a producible human movement, the brain performs a specific perception-action matching process, which possibly facilitates perceptual processing. In this work, we wanted to study whether the producibility of a sound affects the speed at which it is categorized. Participants were presented with isolated sounds, either sung by a natura...

Both speech and music are constituted by sequences of sound elements that unfold in time and require listeners to engage cognitive functions such as sequencing, attention, and memory. We recently ran a set of experiments with the aim of testing the effect of musical expertise on a rather high cognitive function: speech segmentation. Here, we will p...

The acquisition of both speech and music uses general principles: learners extract statistical regularities present in the environment. Yet, individuals who suffer from congenital amusia (commonly called tone-deafness) have experienced lifelong difficulties in acquiring basic musical skills, while their language abilities appear essentially intact....

Previous ERP studies have shown that musicians detect a pitch change in spoken sentences better than non-musicians in both native (French, Schön et al., 2004) and unfamiliar (Portuguese, Marques et al., 2007) language. The aim of the present study was to further investigate differences between musicians and non-musicians in processing pitch changes...

This chapter focuses on the comparative analysis of music and language. One approach to comparing the neural bases of language and music is through the use of song, which is a unique combination of these two cognitive domains. This chapter cites several studies that have investigated the cognition of song and examines the findings relevant to the c...

This chapter further comments on Chapter 27. It focuses on four main points. First, it attempts to clarify what genetics can tell us about the common or distinct origins of music and speech. Second, it examines the evolution of the concept of modularity from Fodor (1983) to Fodor (2000/2003) and what remains of modularity. It argues that if modular...

Strong evidence has accumulated over the past years suggesting that orthography plays a role in spoken language processing. It is still unclear, however, whether the influence of orthography on spoken language results from a co-activation of posterior brain areas dedicated to low-level orthographic processing or whether it results from orthographic...

The aim of this study was to examine the influence of musical expertise in 9-year-old children on passive (as reflected by MMN) and active (as reflected by discrimination accuracy) processing of speech sounds. Musician and nonmusician children were presented with a sequence of syllables that included standards and deviants in vowel frequency, vowel...

Previous studies on action imitation have shown an advantage for biological stimuli compared with nonbiological stimuli, possibly because of the role played by the mirror system. By contrast, little is known on whether such an advantage also takes place in the auditory domain, related to voice imitation. In this study, we wanted to test the hypothe...

Adults and infants can use the statistical properties of syllable sequences to extract words from continuous speech. Here we present a review of a series of electrophysiological studies investigating (1) Speech segmentation resulting from exposure to spoken and sung sequences (2) The extraction of linguistic versus musical information from a sung s...

Musical training is known to modify auditory perception and related cortical organization. Here, we show that these modifications may extend to higher cognitive functions and generalize to processing of speech. Previous studies have shown that adults and newborns can segment a continuous stream of linguistic and nonlinguistic stimuli based only on...

To learn a new language, it is necessary for the learner to succeed in segmenting the continuous stream of sounds into significant units. Previous behavioral studies have shown that it is possible to segment a language or musical stream based only on probabilities of occurrence between adjacent syllables/tones. Here we used a sung language and test...

We tested whether the emergence of familiarity to a melody may trigger or co-occur with the processing of the concept(s) conveyed by emotions to, or semantic association with, the melody. With this objective, we recorded ERPs while participants were presented with highly familiar and less familiar melodies in a gating paradigm. The ERPs time locked...

Two experiments were conducted to examine the conceptual relation between words and nonmeaningful sounds. In order to reduce the role of linguistic mediation, sounds were recorded in such a way that it was highly unlikely to identify the source that produced them. Related and unrelated sound–word pairs were presented in Experiment 1 and the order o...

Example of stimulus pair in condition same word/different melody (W = M≠). (0.22 MB WAV)

Pairs of sung words in each of the four experimental conditions, in one list of the Latin Square design (the first author can be contacted to obtain the other three lists), with each trisyllabic French word and the 3-note melody on which it was sung (one note per syllable). The melodies are represented in standard MIDI codes, where: C4 = 60, C#4 =...

Example of stimulus pair in condition different word/same melody (W≠ M = ) (0.22 MB WAV)

Example of stimulus pair in condition different word/different melody (W≠ M≠). (0.22 MB WAV)

Example of stimulus pair in condition same word/same melody (W = M = ). (0.22 MB WAV)

Language and music, two of the most unique human cognitive abilities, are combined in song, rendering it an ecological model for comparing speech and music cognition. The present study was designed to determine whether words and melodies in song are processed interactively or independently, and to examine the influence of attention on the processin...

Two fMRI experiments were conducted using song to investigate the domain specificity of linguistic and musical processing. In Experiment 1, participants listened to pairs of spoken words, "vocalise" (i.e., singing without words), and sung words while performing a same-different task. Results revealed bilateral involvement of middle and superior tem...

The cognitive processing of concepts, that is, abstract general ideas, has been mostly studied with language. However, other domains, such as music, can also convey concepts. Koelsch et al. [Koelsch, S., Kasper, E., Sammler, D., Schulze, K., Gunter, T., & Friederici, A. D. Music, language and meaning: Brain signatures of semantic processing. Nature...

One of the most studied effects of verbal working memory (WM) is the influence of the length of the words that compose the list to be remembered. This work aims to investigate the nature of musical WM by replicating the word length effect in the musical domain. Length and rate of presentation were manipulated in a recognition task of tone sequences...

Recent evidence suggests that music perception, much alike language perception, involves the cognitive processing of concepts, that is abstract general ideas. In a previous study (Daltrozzo and Schön, Conceptual processing in music as revealed by N400 effects on words and musical targets. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, In Press), we reported th...

The aim of this study was to determine whether conceptual priming occurs between successively presented short musical pieces called Temporal Semantic Units (TSUs). Behavioral and ERP data were recorded while participants, experts and nonexperts in TSUs, were listening to pairs of TSUs and were asked to determine whether the target TSU evoked the sa...

Whereas the general population usually sings accurately (Dalla Bella 2007), certain individuals display a real deficit in pitch matching whilst singing. The description of this deficit in adults is in its infancy. This is an acoustic study of 15 adults judged socially as poor singers. The accuracy is tested by three elementary tests of song: A repr...

In previous research, Saffran and colleagues [Saffran, J. R., Aslin, R. N., & Newport, E. L. (1996). Statistical learning by 8-month-old infants. Science, 274, 1926-1928; Saffran, J. R., Newport, E. L., & Aslin, R. N. (1996). Word segmentation: The role of distributional cues. Journal of Memory and Language, 35, 606-621.] have shown that adults and...