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Learning speech surrogacy: neural processing of the acquisition of language encoded on a musical instrument
Poster Session F, Friday, October 2, 2:45 - 4:45 pm, Wangari Maathai
This poster is part of the Sandbox Series.
Samantha Wray1, Laura McPherson1, Mamadou Diabate2; 1Dartmouth College, 2Indepedent researcher
Musical speech surrogates are systems of communication in which linguistic structure is encoded in musical form to transmit a message, and can include flutes, “talking drums”, and many others (see McPherson & Winter (2022) for an overview). Neurolinguistic investigation into speech surrogacy is almost entirely unexplored, with the exception of an fMRI study on Silbo Gomero, a whistled speech surrogate from the Canary Islands that is non-musical and utilizes no instrument, which found that practitioners recruited left hemisphere temporal lobe regions associated with language processing while listening to whistled speech (Carreiras et al. 2005), but this work does not directly inform how speech surrogacy is learned. The present study presents preliminary neurolinguistic work on learning speech surrogacy. Seenku (a language of Burkina Faso) can be encoded and played on a balafon, a resonator xylophone constructed of large gourds beneath wooden keys that are struck by mallets. N=4 non-Seenku speaking university students in the United States underwent a training course to learn how to play the balafon – which included learning how to use it as a speech surrogate – from an expert practitioner. Participants underwent two testing sessions: one at the beginning of their balafon learning course, and one after approximately 6 weeks of lessons. Testing consisted of participants passively listening to stimuli while data were recorded on a 14 sensor EEG system (Emotiv Epoc X), with a memory probe task randomly dispersed to ensure participant attention. Participants listened to four types of stimuli, presented randomly: (1) Seenku speech (2) balafon playing music devoid of any linguistic content (3) balafon “singing” (which combines melody with lyricism) (4) balafon speech surrogacy, characterized by the rote encoding of linguistic content onto notes and rhythms, used for communication. The Seenku speech condition was the most acoustically distinct, whereas the other conditions were produced by the balafon. An ERP analysis revealed that the second session showed increased activity at several electrodes, including F7 which has been previously implicated in language learning (Soman et al. 2019). Future planned analyses include comparison of the elicited EEG signal of the learners with EEG recorded from the expert practitioner who also performed the listening task (N=1) and with EEG recorded from an expert balafon player who does not utilize the instrument for speech surrogacy, only for music (N=1). Overall, the current results suggest that language is flexible enough to be externally encoded in other domains beyond literacy, specifically using musical instruments, with minimal training.
Topic Areas: Speech Perception,