The Role of Phase-locking to the Temporal Envelope of Speech in Auditory Perception and Speech Intelligibility

Millman, Rebecca E.; Johnson, Samuel; Prendergast, Garreth

doi:10.1162/jocn_a_00719

Cited by 76 publications

(104 citation statements)

References 49 publications

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“…One seemingly contradictory finding to the present results is reported by Millman et al (2014) who fail to find any effect of intelligibility on the speech-tracking response to tone-vocoded speech. This null effect, which is also in contrast to several previous studies that found effects of intelligibility on sensory processing of speech (e.g.…”

Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 99%

“…A recent study showed that speech-tracking of tone-vocoded speech was not altered even when their intelligibility was increased due to training (Millman et al 2014), suggesting that the mere fact that a stimulus is intelligible does not necessarily enhance its speech-tracking response. Unfortunately, in that study responses to natural speech were not compared to the artificial vocoded stimuli.…”

Section: 2 Effects Of Linguistic Processing On Sensory Responsesmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

The effects of selective attention and speech acoustics on neural speech-tracking in a multi-talker scene

Rimmele

Golumbic

Schröger

et al. 2015

Cortex

154

132

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Attending to one speaker in multi-speaker situations is challenging. One neural mechanism proposed to underlie the ability to attend to a particular speaker is phase-locking of low-frequency activity in auditory cortex to speech’s temporal envelope (“speech-tracking”), which is more precise for attended speech. However, it is not known what brings about this attentional effect, and specifically if it reflects enhanced processing of the fine structure of attended speech. To investigate this question we compared attentional effects on speech-tracking of natural vs. vocoded speech which preserves the temporal envelope but removes the fine-structure of speech. Pairs of natural and vocoded speech stimuli were presented concurrently and participants attended to one stimulus and performed a detection task while ignoring the other stimulus. We recorded magnetoencephalography (MEG) and compared attentional effects on the speech-tracking response in auditory cortex. Speech-tracking of natural, but not vocoded, speech was enhanced by attention, whereas neural tracking of ignored speech was similar for natural and vocoded speech. These findings suggest that the more precise speech tracking of attended natural speech is related to processing its fine structure, possibly reflecting the application of higher-order linguistic processes. In contrast, when speech is unattended its fine structure is not processed to the same degree and thus elicits less precise speech tracking more similar to vocoded speech.

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Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 99%

Section: 2 Effects Of Linguistic Processing On Sensory Responsesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The effects of selective attention and speech acoustics on neural speech-tracking in a multi-talker scene

Rimmele

Golumbic

Schröger

et al. 2015

Cortex

154

132

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Alternatively, our results suggest that during speech listening, low-frequency neural tracking may be weakly modulated by top-down word segmentation processing (Howard and Poeppel 2010;Millman et al 2015;Obleser et al 2012;Peña and Melloni 2012). The small phase differences observed in LFO contrast with the large phase reversals of low-frequency entrainment reported during attentional selection (Besle et al 2011;Gomez-Ramirez et al 2011;Lakatos et al 2008) and cocktail party effects (Zion Golumbic et al 2013).…”

Section: Origins Of the Difference Between Hfa And Lfo Effectsmentioning

confidence: 59%

“…However, and importantly, speech intelligibility was also confounded with changes in the acoustic properties of the speech signal, leaving open the possibility that the observed modulations of LFO were driven by acoustic cues. In fact, in a different series of experiments controlling for acoustic properties, no direct link between speech intelligibility and neural entrainment of LFO was found (Millman et al 2015;Peña and Melloni 2012;Zoefel and VanRullen 2015). All in all, these results suggest that LFO may govern attention and temporal expectation mechanisms that regulate the gain of the acoustic information but may not reflect top-down syllable/word segmentation per se.…”

mentioning

confidence: 73%

High-frequency neural activity predicts word parsing in ambiguous speech streams

Kösem

Basirat

Azizi

et al. 2016

Journal of Neurophysiology

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Kösem A, Basirat A, Azizi L, van Wassenhove V. High-frequency neural activity predicts word parsing in ambiguous speech streams. J Neurophysiol 116: 2497-2512, 2016. First published September 7, 2016 doi:10.1152/jn.00074.2016.-During speech listening, the brain parses a continuous acoustic stream of information into computational units (e.g., syllables or words) necessary for speech comprehension. Recent neuroscientific hypotheses have proposed that neural oscillations contribute to speech parsing, but whether they do so on the basis of acoustic cues (bottom-up acoustic parsing) or as a function of available linguistic representations (top-down linguistic parsing) is unknown. In this magnetoencephalography study, we contrasted acoustic and linguistic parsing using bistable speech sequences. While listening to the speech sequences, participants were asked to maintain one of the two possible speech percepts through volitional control. We predicted that the tracking of speech dynamics by neural oscillations would not only follow the acoustic properties but also shift in time according to the participant's conscious speech percept. Our results show that the latency of high-frequency activity (specifically, beta and gamma bands) varied as a function of the perceptual report. In contrast, the phase of low-frequency oscillations was not strongly affected by top-down control. Whereas changes in low-frequency neural oscillations were compatible with the encoding of prelexical segmentation cues, high-frequency activity specifically informed on an individual's conscious speech percept.

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“…In the last ten years, studies with M/EEG (magneto/electro-encephalography) have shown the importance of neural oscillations to brain function, providing an alternative and often convergent perspective upon the neural processes involved in speech comprehension. For example, Peelle, Gross, & Davis (2013) showed in MEG that neural oscillations tracking the envelope of speech (between 4 and 7 Hz) were bilateral in response to unintelligible speech, but showed greater phase locking and left lateralization in the case of intelligible signals (though see Millman, Johnson, & Prendergast (2014) for contradictory evidence). Other studies have shown evidence for hierarchical organization of oscillatory activity across frequency bands (Lakatos et al, 2005) and the importance of alpha oscillations (8-13 Hz), localized to temporal as well as parietal and prefrontal cortex, in predicting comprehension ratings of degraded speech (Obleser & Weisz, 2012), strongly paralleling findings from fMRI.…”

Section: Future Directionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Comprehending auditory speech: previous and potential contributions of functional MRI

Evans

McGettigan

2017

Language, Cognition and Neuroscience

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Functional neuroimaging revolutionized the study of human language in the late 20 th Century, allowing researchers to investigate its underlying cognitive processes in the intact brain. Here, we review how functional MRI (fMRI) in particular has contributed to our understanding of speech comprehension, with a focus on studies of intelligibility. We highlight the use of carefully controlled acoustic stimuli to reveal the underlying hierarchical organization of speech processing systems and cortical (a)symmetries, and discuss the contributions of novel design and analysis techniques to the contextualization of perisylvian regions within wider speech processing networks. Within this, we outline the methodological challenges of fMRI as a technique for investigating speech and describe the innovations that have overcome or mitigated these difficulties. Focussing on multivariate approaches to fMRI, we highlight how these techniques have allowed both local neural representations and broader scale brain systems to be described. 3 General IntroductionThe emergence of functional neuroimaging in the 1990s offered the unprecedented opportunity to examine the processing of spoken language in the intact, functioning human brain with a spatial resolution on the order of millimetres. Building upon the highly influential neuropsychological literature of the late 19 th and 20 th Centuries, a key aim of empirical study was uncovering the neural substrates for the comprehension of speech. Here, we offer a review and synthesis of the contributions of functional imaging -in particular, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) -to our understanding of the functional neuroanatomy of speech comprehension. We also offer an evaluation of the method and ask whether fMRI will continue to contribute substantially to our knowledge, or whether other modalities (or combinations of techniques) hold more promise for the future of the field.Other authors have offered excellent overviews of the state of the art in the functional imaging of language processes more generally (e.g. Price, 2012), and in the specific methodological challenges of examining auditory processing with fMRI (Peelle 2014). For this review, we felt that it was timely to limit our discussion to the use of fMRI in the investigation of speech comprehension. The study of speech comprehension has been at the centre of significant theoretical debate in the last decade, for example in addressing the role of hemispheric asymmetries and motor contributions to speech perception. Advances in experimental design and data analysis have played an important role in refining our understanding of these issues.Here, we highlight in particular the contributions and future opportunities afforded by multivariate analyses of the BOLD response in examining the nature and content of neural representations of the speech signal. Approaches such as Representational Similarity Analysis (Kriegeskorte et al., 2008), provide promise for integrating multiple imaging modalities, allowing examinatio...

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The Role of Phase-locking to the Temporal Envelope of Speech in Auditory Perception and Speech Intelligibility

Cited by 76 publications

References 49 publications

The effects of selective attention and speech acoustics on neural speech-tracking in a multi-talker scene

The effects of selective attention and speech acoustics on neural speech-tracking in a multi-talker scene

High-frequency neural activity predicts word parsing in ambiguous speech streams

Comprehending auditory speech: previous and potential contributions of functional MRI

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