HUSH Stories-Tones

PI Name: Scott K Holland,PhD

Email: scott.Holland@cchmc.org

Areas: Primary Auditory cortex, BA41, 42, Heschel’s Gyrus, Language areas in BA22 (Wernicke’s Area) 37,39

Program: MacStim

Durations: 9 min.

Special Equipment: MR compatible audio system and headphones

Description: This is a three phase auditory paradigm administered as clustered acquisition as shown in the timing diagram below. The auditory stimulation is presented when the MRI gradients are silent. The control condition is silence followed by:

i. Narrow Band Noise Tone (NBN) Task – This task is patterned after standard audiology evaluations of detection thresholds in deaf patients. Each NBN tone is of 1 seconds duration with center frequency of 250 - 4000 Hz and bandwidth of 50%. The sequence is random and tone center frequency can either be constant or chirp modulated. Each tone sequence will be played for 5 sec. during the silent interval of the scanner. NBN tone intervals will alternate with silent intervals.

ii. Speech Task – This task is patterned after earlier imaging studies of infant hearing and language development and general knowledge of early speech recognition. Again, the timing of the stimulus intervals follows the diagram in Figure 9. In this case the stimulus will consist of the pre-recorded female voice (A. Byars) reading several short stories previously used in fMRI studies of language development.(Holland et al., 2004b) The stories are broken into speech segments of 5 sec duration. Speech segments will be alternated with silent intervals for maximal contrast between conditions in auditory and speech recognition regions.