Barrett, The Honors College Thesis/Creative Project Collection
Barrett, The Honors College at Arizona State University proudly showcases the work of undergraduate honors students by sharing this collection exclusively with the ASU community.
Barrett accepts high performing, academically engaged undergraduate students and works with them in collaboration with all of the other academic units at Arizona State University. All Barrett students complete a thesis or creative project which is an opportunity to explore an intellectual interest and produce an original piece of scholarly research. The thesis or creative project is supervised and defended in front of a faculty committee. Students are able to engage with professors who are nationally recognized in their fields and committed to working with honors students. Completing a Barrett thesis or creative project is an opportunity for undergraduate honors students to contribute to the ASU academic community in a meaningful way.
Filtering by
- All Subjects: Neuroscience
- All Subjects: Brain Stimulation
- Creators: Daliri, Ayoub
Speech motor learning is important for learning to speak during childhood and maintaining the speech system throughout adulthood. Motor and auditory cortical regions play crucial roles in speech motor learning. This experiment aimed to use transcranial alternating current stimulation, a neurostimulation technique, to influence auditory and motor cortical activity. In this study, we used an auditory-motor adaptation task as an experimental model of speech motor learning. Subjects repeated words while receiving formant shifts, which made the subjects’ speech sound different from their production. During the adaptation task, subjects received Beta (20 Hz), Alpha (10 Hz), or Sham stimulation. We applied the stimulation to the ventral motor cortex that is involved in planning speech movements. We found that the stimulation did not influence the magnitude of adaptation. We suggest that some limitations of the study may have contributed to the negative results.
stimuli played prior to the onset of speech production. In this experiment, we are examining the
specificity of the auditory stimulus by implementing congruent and incongruent speech sounds in
addition to non-speech sound. Electroencephalography (EEG) data was recorded for eleven adult
subjects in both speaking (speech planning) and silent reading (no speech planning) conditions.
Data analysis was accomplished manually as well as via generation of a MATLAB code to
combine data sets and calculate auditory modulation (suppression). Results of the P200
modulation showed that modulation was larger for incongruent stimuli than congruent stimuli.
However, this was not the case for the N100 modulation. The data for pure tone could not be
analyzed because the intensity of this stimulus was substantially lower than that of the speech
stimuli. Overall, the results indicated that the P200 component plays a significant role in
processing stimuli and determining the relevance of stimuli; this result is consistent with role of
P200 component in high-level analysis of speech and perceptual processing. This experiment is
ongoing, and we hope to obtain data from more subjects to support the current findings.
