Ferenc Honbolygó

Hungarian Academy of Sciences | HAS · Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and Psychology

Rhythmic skills have been repeatedly found to relate to children’s early literacy skills. Using rhythmic tasks to predict language and reading performance seems a promising direction as they can be easily administered early as a screening test to identify at-risk children. In the present study, we measured Hungarian children’s (N = 37) general cogn...

To process speech in a multi-talker environment, listeners need to segregate the mixture of incoming speech streams and focus their attention on one of them. Potentially, speech prosody could aid the segregation of different speakers, the selection of the desired speech stream, and detecting targets within the attended stream. For testing these iss...

Agar dapat berinteraksi secara efisien terhadap banyaknya informasi sensori, otak memiliki strategi heuristis yang dapat menyaring informasi sekaligus mengarahkan atensi ketika muncul informasi yang penting dan krusial. Penelitian tentang otak telah mengungkapkan salah satu penanda atas sistem tersebut, yang disebut sebagai Mismatch Negativity (MMN...

The present studies investigated the impacts of the different implementation of body movement into classroom-based comprehensive music programs on the development of music-related and nonmusical abilities in Hungarian primary school children. In Study 1, science-focused classes received Kodály music lessons completed with teacher-directed movements...

Previous studies have shown that music trainings can enhance linguistic processes (e.g., categorical perception, phonological awareness) and cognitive abilities (e.g., working memory) in children with dyslexia or any other reading disorder. Our aim is to present a music training programme we have developed for children with dyslexia; in addition, w...

To process speech in a multi-talker environment, listeners need to segregate the mixture of incoming speech streams and focus their attention on one of them. Potentially, speech prosody could aid the segregation of different speakers, the selection of the desired speech stream, and detecting targets within the attended stream. For testing these iss...

Multifeature paradigms record fast Mismatch Negativity (MMN) ERP responses and investigate the central auditory processing. Our speech multifeature paradigm included changes in vowel, consonant, word stress, frequency and intensity. We investigated adults' involuntary discrimination of speech sound features which are phonetically or acoustically al...

Music trainings have been reported to effectively improve linguistic processes (e.g., phonological awareness, categorical perception) and cognitive functions (e.g., working memory) in children with dyslexia. We designed a Randomized Control Trial (RCT) study to assess the efficacy of a music training method we have developed for 10-year-old childre...

The ability to synchronise one’s movements to the sound of a regular beat has been found to be associated with children’s language and reading abilities. Sensorimotor synchronisation or tapping performance can among other factors [e.g., working memory and rapid automatized naming (RAN)] predict phonological awareness and word reading accuracy and f...

The present study explored longitudinal relations between musical abilities (discrimination, auditory-visual connection) and precursor skills of reading (phonemic awareness, rapid naming, phonological memory, phonemic fluency) in 6–7-year-old children starting primary school. Eighty-five participants were assessed twice over the first school year t...

Previous studies have reported that multifeature paradigms allow the recording of Mismatch Negativity (MMN) ERP responses under a short period of time as well as examining the central auditory processing. In the present study, we developed a multifeature paradigm, which included five types of changes in the parameters of speech: vowel change, conso...

In speech processing, in the first year of life, prosody and phoneme-relevant aspects serve different functions. Recent studies have assumed that the two aspects become integrated at around 9 months of age. The present study investigates the effect of lexical status on stress processing in a fixed stress language. We hypothesize that lexicality mod...

The purpose of this presentation is to discuss previous studies, which investigate the effectiveness of music training for children with reading difficulties. A brief description of a new music training will follow. The studies which will be presented, focus on the analogy between music and language as well as the temporal and rhythmic features of...

Developmental dyslexia (DD) is a learning disorder affecting the ability to read, with a heritability of 40-60%. A notable part of this heritability remains unexplained, and large genetic studies are warranted to identify new susceptibility genes and clarify the genetic bases of dyslexia. We carried out a genome-wide association study (GWAS) on 227...

A new speech multifeature paradigm (i.e., with vowel, consonant, word stress, frequency, intensity as the five types of deviant conditions) investigated using CVCV pseudowords which were designed by following the phonemic and acoustic parameters of the Hungarian language. The largest Mismatch Negativity (MMN) peaks were found in the vowel and conso...

Studies have shown that music training can enhance linguistic processes (e.g., categorical perception, phonological awareness) and cognitive functions involved in reading (Flaugnacco et al, 2015; Habib et al., 2016). This project aims to develop a music training and measure its effects. In the pre-training phase, we will recruit 10-year-old childre...

The role of working memory (WM) has been evidenced in language processing; however, the contribution of WM to the detection of linguistic deviance has remained unclear. This study aimed to examine how WM performance influences the detection of prosodic deviance in a fixed-stress language, which is supposed to be determined by a long-term word stres...

Background Several papers pointed out that the language disorders are the most commonly reported cognitive deficits of the preterm (PT) infants. However, neither the exact interpretation (disrupted or delayed) of their language development nor the most powerful perinatal risk factors have been specified yet. Aims We aimed to determine whether post...

A ritmikai és a nyelvi, illetve olvasási képességek közötti kapcsolatot a gyakorlati megfi gyeléseken túl számos kutatás eredménye látszik alátámasztani, ugyanakkor a magyar anyanyelvű gyerekeket vizsgáló munkák száma ez idáig csekély. 39 tipikus első osztályos (6–7 éves) tanuló vizsgálatára került sor a tanév kezdetekor egy digitális, gyermekek sz...

Speech unfolds at different time scales. Therefore, neuronal mechanisms involved in speech processing should likewise operate at different (corresponding) time scales. The present study aimed to identify speech units relevant for selecting speech streams in a multi-talker situation. Functional connectivity was extracted from the continuous EEG whil...

A recent dual-stream model of language processing proposed that the postero-dorsal stream performs predictive sequential processing of linguistic information via hierarchically organized internal models. However, it remains unexplored whether the prosodic segmentation of linguistic information involves predictive processes. Here, we addressed this...

Acoustic predictability has been shown to affect auditory stream segregation, while linguistic predictability is known to be an important factor in speech comprehension. We tested the effects of linguistic predictability on auditory stream segregation and target detection by assessing the event-related potentials elicited by targets and distractors...

Understanding speech at the basic levels entails the simultaneous and independent processing of phonemic and prosodic features. While it is well-established that phoneme perception relies on language-specific long-term traces, it is unclear if the processing of prosodic features similarly involves language-specific representations. In the present s...

A growing body of research supports the link between rhythmic abilities and the development of language and reading (e.g. Bonacina, Krizman, White-Schwoch, & Kraus, 2018; Colling, Noble, & Goswami, 2017; Flaugnacco et al., 2015; Woodruff Carr, White-Schwoch, Tierney, Strait, & Kraus, 2014), while investigations carried out with Hungarian speaking c...

The potential of music education to improve children’s literacy abilities is still under debate. Meta-analyses revealed that the findings on the relationship between musical abilities and precursors of reading are inconsistent showing associations between the two domains or only within-domain associations. As previous studies have rarely investigat...

Background: Preterm birth is associated with various risks, including delayed or atypical language development. The prenatal start of prosodic tuning may affect the processing of word stress, an important suprasegmental feature of spoken utterances. Aim: Our study focused on the expected contribution of intra-uterine experience to word stress pr...

Neuroscience findings have recently received critique on the lack of replications. To examine the reproducibility of brain indices of speech sound discrimination and their role in dyslexia, a specific reading difficulty, brain event-related potentials using EEG were measured using the same cross-linguistic passive oddball paradigm in about 200 dysl...

Neuroscience findings have recently received critique on the lack of replications. To examine the reproducibility of brain indices of speech sound discrimination and their role in dyslexia, a specific reading difficulty, brain event-related potentials using EEG were measured using the same cross-linguistic passive oddball paradigm in about 200 dysl...

Entrainment to periodic acoustic stimuli has been found to relate both to the auditory and motor cortices, and it could be influenced by the maturity of these brain regions. However, existing research in this topic provides data about different oscillatory brain activities in different age groups with different musical background. In order to obtai...

Previous studies have demonstrated that active engagement in musical activities benefits auditory and cognitive processing. However, it is still unclear whether musical experience improves domain-general mechanisms reflected in superior functioning in language or the enhancement is selective and limited to musical abilities. In the present study, w...

Developmental dyslexia (DD) is one of the most prevalent learning disorders, with high impact on school and psychosocial development and high comorbidity with conditions like attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), depression, and anxiety. DD is characterized by deficits in different cognitive skills, including word reading, spelling, rapi...

A wide range of music intervention programs have been developed to enhance children’s early literacy skills but the effects of music training are still controversial (Butzlaff, 2000; Gordon, Fehd, & McCandliss, 2015). In Hungary, special emphasis is placed on school music instruction; therefore, we investigated the efficacy of new music educational...

Quick reorientation is an essential part of successful navigation. Despite growing attention to this ability, little is known about how reorientation happens in humans. To this aim, we recorded EEG from 34 participants. Participants were navigating a simple virtual reality plus-maze where at the beginning of each trial they were randomly teleported...

Previous studies investigating the neurocognitive background of word stress processing demonstrated that words differing in their stress pattern are discriminated automatically and unconsciously as shown by the emergence of the Mismatch Negativity (MMN) event-related brain potential (ERP) component. However, it has remained unclear if the processin...

Large-scale functional brain network correlates of speech predictability effects on speaker separation The predictability of speech influences the quality of comprehension, especially in noisy environments. We explored the large-scale functional brain networks underlying speech perception in the presence of an interfering stream while varying sema...

Studies have shown that active engagement in musical activities advances speech perception and language-related skills (Miendlarzewska & Trost, 2014). Although several programs have been developed to examine the link between music instruction and linguistic abilities in 6-7-year-old children, only a few studies investigated the possible short-term...

Quick reorientation is an essential part of successful navigation. Despite growing attention to this ability, little is known about how reorientation happens in humans. To this aim, we recorded EEG from 34 participants. Participants were navigating a simple virtual reality plus-maze where at the beginning of each trial they were randomly teleported...

Several studies have shown the benefits of music training on multiple musical and non-musical skills. Because our perception of music is inherently rhythmic, it is possible that the underlying mechanism of the transfer effect of music is rhythmic entrainment. Previous studies found transfer effects of sensorimotor entrainment (SE), a form of rhythm...

The Research Group on Active Music Learning has been established in collaboration between the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music and works under the auspices of the Content Pedagogy Research Program of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Our interdisciplinary research endeavours to develop a new practice for elementary s...

Previous studies have revealed that regular, active engagement with music in early life leads to improvements in general auditory skills and in cognitive functioning. However, results from these studies indicate that both the intensity and the focus of music instruction can affect the development of cognitive abilities in school-aged children. Ther...

Developmental dyslexia (DD) is one of the most prevalent learning disorders among children and is characterized by deficits in different cognitive skills, including reading, spelling, short term memory and others. To help unravel the genetic basis of these skills, we conducted a Genome Wide Association Study (GWAS), including nine cohorts of readin...

Languages with contrastive stress, such as English or German, distinguish some words only via the stress status of their syllables, such as "CONtent" and "conTENT" (capitals indicate a stressed syllable). Listeners with a fixed-stress native language, such as Hungarian, have difficulties in explicitly discriminating variation of the stress position...

Although several studies have proved the positive impacts of out-of-school music training on basic cognitive and linguistic abilities, only a few music interventions have examined the possible benefits of music education in school contexts. In the present study, we aimed to investigate the behavioral transfer effects of a movement-based music educa...

Technological development brings increasingly closer the era of widely available self-driving cars. However, presumably there will be a time when human drivers and self-driving cars would share the same roads. In the current paper, we propose a cognitive warning system that utilizes information collected from the behaviour of the human driver and s...

Objectives Stress “deafness” is a difficulty in the detection of stress pattern changes of second language (L2) words. This study investigated the influence of cognitive factors and L2 proficiency on the processing of L2 stress. Methodology Fifty-four native speakers of Hungarian, a language with non-contrastive stress, participated in the study;...

The spatial location of objects is processed in egocentric and allocentric reference frames, the early temporal dynamics of which have remained relatively unexplored. Previous experiments focused on ERP components related only to egocentric navigation. Thus, we designed a virtual reality experiment to see whether allocentric reference frame-related...

In the present study, we investigated the processing of word stress related acoustic features in a word context. In a passive oddball multi-feature MMN experiment, we presented a disyllabic pseudo-word with two acoustically similar syllables as standard stimulus, and five contrasting deviants that differed from the standard in that they were either...

In the present study, we investigate how lexicality affects the processing of suprasegmental features at the word level. In contrast to earlier studies which analyzed the role of either segmental or suprasegmental feature in language processing our aim was to investigate the effect of the lexical status on the processing of violated stress pattern...

Background and aims: Syntax needs to be processed in order to understand a sentence. Here we studied the event-related brain potentials (ERPs) elicited by syntactic violations: the left anterior negativity (LAN) and the P600. LAN signals the morphosyntactic violations. P600 is assumed to reflect structural reanalysis when encountering grammatically...

Several studies have shown the benefits of music training on cognitive, linguistic and neural development. It has been also found that incorporating movement instruction into music education can improve musical competence. However, it is not known whether movement instruction in music education can also relate to other, non-musical skills. Here we...

Understanding spoken language depends on processing the delicate combination of grammatical structure, meaning and prosody of utterances. Previous studies have established that prosody influences the processing of sentences when the grammatical structure is ambiguous, however it is unclear how closely prosody and syntax are related when there is no...

This study investigated the role of impaired inhibitory control as a factor underlying attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Children with ADHD and typically developing children completed an animal Stroop task while electroencephalogram (EEG) was recorded. The lateralized readiness potential and event-related brain potentials associated...

Designing multimodal virtual environments promises revolutionary advances in interacting with computers in the near future. In this paper, we report the results of an experimental investigation on the possible use of surround-sound systems to support visualization, taking advantage of increased knowledge about how spatial perception and attention w...

The paper presents a versatile experimentation framework for psychophysical research of spatial cognition. The framework provides a systematic experiment description format, which does not require strong programming skills to define complex scenarios and stimulation strategies. A key feature of the system that it supports different displays from a...

Wireless EEG is a promising tool that can bring neuroscience research closer to the study of perception and cognition in realistic scenarios. Perhaps the most interesting approach is to combine wireless EEG and virtual reality, where one can create and manipulate realistic multimodal environments. However EEG recording during locomotion in a virtua...

In the present paper, we investigated the learning of object location in a virtual reality environment. Previous studies suggested that learning is essentially different when participants rely on landmarks (i.e., single stationary objects in the space) or boundaries (i.e., terrain features), the former requiring associative reinforcement learning,...

High impulsive individuals have problems with self-monitoring and learning from their mistakes. The aim of this study was to investigate whether error processing is impaired in high trait impulsivity, and how it is modulated by the task difficulty. Adults were classified as high (n = 10) and low (n = 10) impulsive participants based on the Barratt...

The aim of the present study was to investigate the role of executive functions (EFs) in different strategies underlying risky decision making. Adult participants from a nonclinical sample were assigned to low or high EF groups based on their performance on EF tasks measuring shifting, updating, and inhibition. ERPs were recorded while participants...

From early months of life prosody has a prominent contribution to segmentation: prosodic boundaries overlap with syntactic ones and facilitate the extraction of syntactic regularities both at word and at phrase level. Therefore, the long-term representation of rhythmic features of the native language, especially the stress templates derived from re...

Absztrakt Afigyelemhianyos/hiperaktivitas zavar (ADHD) olyan neurologiai eredetű, a viselkedes szintjen megjelenő fejlődesi zavar, amely jelenlegi tudasunk szerint a figyelmi es vegrehajto funkciok agyi halozatanak atipikus műkodesere vezethető vissza. Bar a magatartasi zavarok es az alacsony iskolai teljesitmeny miatt a gyakorlo szakemberek szeles...

Extension of the human senses means not just the detection of changes by an artificial system, but also how that artificial sensory system can provide information about that to the human user. Warning signals serve the facilitation of detection of visual objects. We investigated how warning signals and signaled objects integrate into multimoda...

Infants born prematurely are at higher risk for later linguistic deficits present in delayed or atypical processing of phonetic and prosodic information. In order to be able to specify the nature of this atypical development, it is important to investigate the role of early experience in language perception. According to the concept of Gonzalez-Gom...