Presenter(s): Erin Petruccione
Co Presenter(s): Temerity Bauer
Faculty Mentor(s): Santiago Jaramillo
Poster 49
Session: Sciences
The ability to communicate in languages besides our native tongue is an important skill in a globalized world. In order to learn a new language, a person must learn new ways of categorizing speech sounds. While several strategies have been developed for second-language learning, the neural basis of how we learn a new language are largely unknown. To investigate the neural mechanisms responsible for learning sounds from a new language, we taught mice to discriminate between different sets of speech sounds. The anatomy and physiology of the auditory system of the mouse is such that principles learned in this animal model may provide important hypotheses for how learning occurs in humans. Mice were successfully able to categorize speech sounds according to spectral features (which differentiate the sound /ba/ from /da/) or temporal features (which differentiate /ba/ from /pa/). In the second part of the study, we used optogenetics to test whether mice were able to discriminate among speech sounds when their auditory cortex is inhibited. We accomplished this by expressing a light- sensitive protein in the neurons of the auditory cortex so they could be inactivated with green light. Preliminary data suggests a decrease in performance during optogenetic inactivation, indicating that categorization of some speech sounds in mice depends on the activity of the auditory cortex. A full characterization of how performance is affected during auditory cortex inactivation is underway. Identifying the neural mechanisms of speech sound categorization will inform better approaches for effectively and efficiently learning a foreign language.