Predicting individual speech intelligibility from the cortical tracking of acoustic- and phonetic-level speech representations

Abstract

Highlights: Objective EEG-based measure of speech intelligibility  Improved prediction of speech intelligibility by combining speech representations  Cortical tracking of speech in the delta EEG band monotonically increased with SNRs  Cortical responses in the theta EEG band best predicted the speech reception threshold Disclosure: The authors report no disclosures relevant to the manuscript.

Top-down modulation of neural envelope tracking: the interplay with behavioral, self-report and neural measures of listening effort

“…The second aim of this study involves how much each listening effort measure accounts for the unexplained variability in envelope tracking beyond speech understanding. Previous studies have shown that envelope tracking has the potential to be used as an objective measure of speech understanding (Vanthornhout et al, 2018;Decruy et al, 2019;Lesenfants et al, 2019;Verschueren et al, 2019). However, young NH participants show differences in neural envelope tracking that can not be fully attributed to changes in SNR or speech understanding.…”

“…As these modulations, also called the speech envelope, are essential for speech understanding (Shannon et al, 1995), it has been suggested to measure neural tracking of the speech envelope to assess speech understanding. Recent studies have shown an increase in envelope tracking with increasing speech understanding supporting its potential as an objective measure of speech understanding (Ding & Simon, 2012;Vanthornhout et al, 2018;Decruy et al, 2019;Etard & Reichenbach, 2019;Lesenfants et al, 2019). Nevertheless, it is important to take into account that top-down processes can influence neural envelope tracking.…”

The interplay of top-down focal attention and the cortical tracking of speech

“…The correlation between the reconstructed/predicted artificial time-course and the actual values is then a measure of cortical speech tracking. Measures of cortical speech tracking quantify speech processing within the brain opening doors to, for example, an objective measure of an individual speech understanding [4][5][6][7] or auditory attention decoding in a cocktail party scenario [8][9][10] .…”

“…For the tracking of different speech features, the cortical activity in the delta (1 -4 Hz) and theta (4 -8 Hz) frequency bands has been found to be most important 4,5 . This could be partially explained by the matching of the time scale of such brain oscillations with the syllable (4 -8 Hz), word and phrase (1)(2)(3)(4) rates, suggesting a real-time transformation of the continuous acoustic information reaching the auditory cortex in those different linguistic representations [11][12][13][14][15] . On the contrary, the alpha and higher frequency bands show weak and noisy responses presumably reflecting the weaker phase locking of EEG neural data to the speech envelope at higher frequencies 6 .…”

Stimulus-aware spatial filtering for single-trial neural response and temporal response function estimation in high-density EEG with applications in auditory research

“…The correlations between the original neural responses and the predicted stimulus following responses are analyzed (Aiken and Picton, 2008;Di Liberto et al, 2015). The analysis of these correlations can not only contribute to advancing our knowledge of how the brain responds to auditory stimuli under different conditions, but also has potential to act as objective measures of speech intelligibility (Broderick et al, 2018;Di Liberto et al, 2018;Ding and Simon, 2012a;Lesenfants et al, 2019;Vanthornhout et al, 2018).…”