Speech processing deficits cause isolation and depression yet stay hard to diagnose

Evidence

The ability of processing natural speech correctly is of extreme importance for humans as it represents the main method of direct communication between individuals. Although social interaction can be performed in other ways, deficits in any of its aspects can be the cause of discomfort, isolation, and depression. The awareness of this issue is essential for avoiding such consequences, however the diagnosis can be problematic, especially in the less severe cases. Certainly, methodologies for studying this articulated hierarchical system have the potential to drive the understanding of new insights into its mechanisms and to serve as an instrument of diagnosis for neural disorders related to speech. In particular, we are seeking the consolidation of a dependent measure capable of quantifying the higher-level processing of speech contribution to the scalp recorded neural activity. EEG has been shown to be sensitive to phonetic-features of speech (Di Liberto et al. 2015 ). These categorical features capture information to which the envelope of speech is not sensitive, however the actual contribution of higher-level active processes related to intelligibility remains unclear. The framework we have defined here has the potential to disentangle these contributions from low-level EEG responses to spectrogram fluctuations. — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 4427