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The ability to understand speech becomes more difficult with normal aging and with diseases such as Alzheimer’s. This difficulty is caused in part by speech processing deficits. Speech processing is an aspect of hearing that converts the speech you hear into electrical signals your brain can understand. These speech processing deficits are thought to reflect problems with the neuronal connections in auditory cortex. To remedy speech processing deficits and improve the quality of life of people living with speech processing deficits, we first need to understand the complex speech processing pathway. One aspect contributing to speech processing deficits is a specific deficit in detecting the gaps in between words, syllables, and phonemes. Gaps are important cues used to identify the boundaries between words in fluent speech. Moreover, many phonemes (such as /b/ and /p/) are distinguishable based on the timing of gaps within these speech sounds. The ability to detect brief gaps is known as gap detection. Since gaps play an important role in speech processing, the neuronal circuits used in gap detection provide a simplified model of the neuronal circuits used in speech processing. Thus, we focus on gap detection to learn about one part of the speech processing pathway in auditory cortex. To study the pathways used for gap detection, we are assessing the gap detection ability of mice. Once we establish the gap detection ability of mice, successfully manipulating their gap detection ability with optogenetics will imply that gap termination responses do mediate gap detection. |
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