Date of Award


Degree Name

Master of Science


Speech-Language Pathology


Patricia Lara


Limited studies using Event Related Potentials (ERP) comparing attentional differences between individuals with and without brain damage have been conducted. In addition, the literature review showed limited studies examining electrophysiologic performances that compare linguistic and tonal auditory oddball tasks. The purpose of this study is to examine the electrophysicologic differences between a linguistic and tonal oddball task in a group of participants with no brain damage. Event related potentials (ERP) were used to examine the neural processes of attention by measuring peak latency and amplitude of the P300 ERP component. Traditional auditory oddball tasks involve participants discriminating between two tones, a target tone and a non-target tone, to examine the processes involved in attention. Adding a linguistic component increases the complexity of the task thus increasing the demands the individuals has to use. This study compared a linguistic discrimination task between two English CV syllables combinations (/tÊ?/ and /kÊ?/) and a tonal discrimination task between two tones with frequencies of 250 Hz and 325 Hz. Participants for this study were 4 male and 6 female college-aged individuals with no history of brain injury. Participants were evaluated using ERPâ??s that were time-locked with the onset of a linguistic and tonal oddball task. P300 components were analyzed. Since latency of attention varies with the level of difficulty of the discriminating task and linguistic processing is a more complex task than pure tone processing, we hypothesized that there will be a difference in the amplitude and latency of attention between a linguistic and tonal oddball task in a normal population. Results showed no statistically significant differences. This suggests that while the linguistic component increases the complexity and demands of the task, complexity did not affect the attentional process of the participants in this study.




Received from ProQuest

File Size

55 pages

File Format


Rights Holder

Luisa Alejandra Esquivel