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Journal of Undergraduate Research

Keywords

negativity, speech stimuli, geriatric patients

College

David O. McKay School of Education

Department

Communication Disorders

Abstract

Much of the research done in the field of speech perception has focused on the behavioral aspect of language and not on the functionality of the brain itself. For our research, we focused on the neurological processes of speech perception through Quantitative Electroencephalogram (QEEG) 1 and brain mapping. This allowed us to visualize the processes that the brain must go through for successful speech perception. Specifically, we were interested as to how the brain may differ in its processing of speech information in young (18 to 27 years of age) and senior (65 to 80 years of age) individuals. For our research, we utilized the mismatch negativity (MMN) event-related potential, which is known to be present when differences between two sensory stimuli are introduced. 2 It has been shown that the phonemes /ba/ and /ga/ represents prompts that are influenced by speech perception and cognitive abilities, including language disorders. 3 Consequently, we used both the MMN and the /ba/ and /ga/ phonemes to investigate processing differences in the two age groups.

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