Speech-brain phase coupling is enhanced in low contextual semantic predictability conditions

Molinaro, Nicola; Lizarazu, Mikel; Baldin, Veronica; Pérez-Navarro, José; Lallier, Marie; Ríos‐López, Paula

doi:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2021.107830

Cited by 21 publications

(28 citation statements)

References 37 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…This result suggests that when the higher-level cues are not available or reliable, lower-level cues at the phoneme- and acoustic-level may be upregulated or enhanced, or allowed to propagate in order to comprise more of the neural bandwidth. This result is in line with Molinaro et al (2021) where speech envelope tracking was enhanced in low-constraint sentences. Similarly, Donhauser and Baillet (2020) showed that when sentence context is not reliable, phonemic features (i.e., phoneme surprisal and entropy) are enhanced.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 90%

A tradeoff between acoustic and linguistic feature encoding in spoken language comprehension

Tezcan

Weissbart

Martin

2022

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

When we comprehend language from speech, the phase of the neural response aligns with particular features of the speech input, resulting in a phenomenon referred to as neural tracking. In recent years, a large body of work has demonstrated the tracking of the acoustic envelope and abstract linguistic units at the phoneme and word levels, and beyond. However, the degree to which speech tracking is driven by acoustic edges of the signal, or by internally-generated linguistic units, or by the interplay of both, remains contentious. In this study, we used naturalistic story-listening to investigate (1) whether phoneme-level features are tracked over and above acoustic edges, (2) whether word entropy, which can reflect sentence- and discourse-level constraints, impacted the encoding of acoustic and phoneme-level features, and (3) whether the tracking of acoustic edges was enhanced or suppressed during comprehension of a first language (Dutch) compared to a statistically-familiar but uncomprehended language (French). We first show that encoding models with phoneme-level linguistic features, in addition to acoustic features, uncovered an increased neural tracking response; this signal was further amplified in a comprehended language, putatively reflecting the transformation of acoustic features into internally-generated phoneme-level representations. Phonemes were tracked more strongly in a comprehended language, suggesting that language comprehension functions as a neural filter over acoustic edges of the speech signal as it transforms sensory signals into abstract linguistic units. We then show that word entropy enhances neural tracking of both acoustic and phonemic features when sentence- and discourse-context are less constraining. When language was not comprehended, acoustic features, but not phonemic ones, were more strongly modulated, but in contrast, when a first language is comprehended, phoneme features are more strongly modulated. Taken together, our findings highlight the flexible modulation of acoustic, and phonemic features by sentence and discourse-level constraint in language comprehension, and document the neural transformation from speech perception to language comprehension, consistent with an account of language processing as a neural filter from sensory to abstract representations.

show abstract

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 90%

A tradeoff between acoustic and linguistic feature encoding in spoken language comprehension

Tezcan

Weissbart

Martin

2022

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…At the timescale of words, speech tracking was stronger for both idioms and syntactic prose than for sentences (middle panel of Figure 4). These word-level effects might be related to the differential predictability of words in these conditions, as it has been shown that speech tracking is enhanced for unpredictable target words that are presented in low-constraining sentence contexts (Donhauser & Baillet, 2020;Molinaro, Lizarazu, Baldin, Pérez-Navarro, Lallier, & Ríos-López, 2021). In these contexts, target words cannot be predicted by top-down mechanisms, so the brain might rely more strongly on the bottom-up input to ensure successful comprehension (Donhauser & Baillet, 2020;Molinaro et al, 2021).…”

Section: Effects Of Composition On Word-level Speech Trackingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Effects of Structure and Meaning on Cortical Tracking of Linguistic Units in Naturalistic Speech

Coopmans

Hoop

Hagoort

et al. 2022

Neurobiology of Language

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Recent research has established that cortical activity ‘tracks’ the presentation rate of syntactic phrases in continuous speech, even though phrases are abstract units which do not have direct correlates in the acoustic signal. We investigated whether cortical tracking of phrase structures is modulated by the extent to which these structures compositionally determine meaning. To this end, we recorded electroencephalography (EEG) of 38 native speakers who listened to naturally spoken Dutch stimuli in different conditions, which parametrically modulated the degree to which syntactic structure and lexical semantics determine sentence meaning. Tracking was quantified through mutual information between the EEG data and either the speech envelopes or abstract annotations of syntax, all of which were filtered in the frequency band corresponding to the presentation rate of phrases (1.1–2.1 Hz). Overall, these mutual information analyses showed stronger tracking of phrases in regular sentences than in stimuli whose lexical-syntactic content is reduced, but no consistent differences in tracking between sentences and stimuli which contained a combination of syntactic structure and lexical content. While there were no effects of compositional meaning on the degree of phrase-structure tracking, analyses of event-related potentials elicited by sentence-final words did reveal meaning-induced differences between conditions. Our findings suggest that cortical tracking of structure in sentences indexes the internal generation of this structure, a process which is modulated by the properties of its input, but not by the compositional interpretation of its output.

show abstract

“…Once an efficient language processing system has developed, ADS can then contain less regular temporal statistics, as such regular statistics are not required to aid segmentation. Indeed, adults can adapt their linguistic processing via the over-learned temporal predictions of proficient language models (e.g., Molinaro et al, 2021;Ten Oever & Martin, 2020). However, additional cross-linguistic evidence in languages belonging to other rhythmic categories (e.g., the mora-timed rhythms of Japanese), as well as in languages in which lexical stress is completely predictable (e.g., French), or has different degrees of unpredictability (e.g., Basque) is required to test this cross-language developmental hypothesis.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Local Temporal Regularities in Child-Directed Speech in Spanish

Pérez-Navarro

Lallier

Clark

et al. 2022

J Speech Lang Hear Res

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to characterize the local (utterance-level) temporal regularities of child-directed speech (CDS) that might facilitate phonological development in Spanish, classically termed a syllable-timed language. Method: Eighteen female adults addressed their 4-year-old children versus other adults spontaneously and also read aloud (CDS vs. adult-directed speech [ADS]). We compared CDS and ADS speech productions using a spectrotemporal model (Leong & Goswami, 2015), obtaining three temporal metrics: (a) distribution of modulation energy, (b) temporal regularity of stressed syllables, and (c) syllable rate. Results: CDS was characterized by (a) significantly greater modulation energy in the lower frequencies (0.5–4 Hz), (b) more regular rhythmic occurrence of stressed syllables, and (c) a slower syllable rate than ADS, across both spontaneous and read conditions. Discussion: CDS is characterized by a robust local temporal organization (i.e., within utterances) with amplitude modulation bands aligning with delta and theta electrophysiological frequency bands, respectively, showing greater phase synchronization than in ADS, facilitating parsing of stress units and syllables. These temporal regularities, together with the slower rate of production of CDS, might support the automatic extraction of phonological units in speech and hence support the phonological development of children. Supplemental Material: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.21210893

show abstract

Speech-brain phase coupling is enhanced in low contextual semantic predictability conditions

Cited by 21 publications

References 37 publications

A tradeoff between acoustic and linguistic feature encoding in spoken language comprehension

A tradeoff between acoustic and linguistic feature encoding in spoken language comprehension

Effects of Structure and Meaning on Cortical Tracking of Linguistic Units in Naturalistic Speech

Local Temporal Regularities in Child-Directed Speech in Spanish

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About