Clinical or psychological assessment of language comprehension abilities, be that in children or neurological patients, is predominantly done in a behavioural manner using tasks that require some sort of overt responses or other types of interaction with the assessor. Such behavioural tasks might be inconvenient for patients whose condition may prevent them from responding properly (e.g., those suffering from brain damage of motor deficits).

To tackle this, the research team led by Professor Yury Shtyrov at CFIN proposed a language paradigm which allows probing the neural foundations underpinning three key levels of speech comprehension: lexical, semantic and (morpho-)syntactic, without requiring active attention on speech input or  any behavioural responses whilst keeping the recording session duration as short as possible.

The experiment carried out by Rasha Hyder, AU PhD student, together with her colleagues at CFIN and at Aarhus University Hospital, used combined magneto- and electroencephalography (MEG/EEG). They tested two task-free auditory paradigms using speech stimuli that were presented to healthy volunteers, who watched videos during the recordings.

The findings of this study suggest that by employing a custom-built “equiprobable” design, three key levels of speech comprehension could be assessed in a passive, attention-free manner within a short time (~27 min), thus suggesting this paradigm as a time-efficient and subject-friendly tool,  particularly well-suited for subjects/patients who are unable to properly attend or cooperate with instructions.

For full details, please see the full paper just published at Psychophysiology:

Hyder, R., Højlund, A., Jensen, M., Østergaard, K., & Shtyrov, Y. (2020). Objective assessment of automatic language comprehension mechanisms in the brain: Novel E/MEG paradigm. Psychophysiology, 57(5), e13543.

https://doi.org/10.1111/psyp.13543

PhD student Rasha Hyder
Assistant Professor Andreas Højlund
Assistant Professor Mads Jensen
Professor Karen Østergaard
Professor Yury Shtyrov 

For more information please contact:
PhD student Rasha Hyder
rasha.hyder@cfin.au.dk