Neural coding of continuous speech in auditory cortex during monaural and dichotic listening
Nai Ding,Jonathan Z. Simon +1 more
TLDR
These findings characterize how the spectrotemporal features of speech are encoded in human auditory cortex and establish a single-trial-based paradigm to study the neural basis underlying the cocktail party phenomenon.Abstract:
The cortical representation of the acoustic features of continuous speech is the foundation of speech perception. In this study, noninvasive magnetoencephalography (MEG) recordings are obtained from human subjects actively listening to spoken narratives, in both simple and cocktail party-like auditory scenes. By modeling how acoustic features of speech are encoded in ongoing MEG activity as a spectrotemporal response function, we demonstrate that the slow temporal modulations of speech in a broad spectral region are represented bilaterally in auditory cortex by a phase-locked temporal code. For speech presented monaurally to either ear, this phase-locked response is always more faithful in the right hemisphere, but with a shorter latency in the hemisphere contralateral to the stimulated ear. When different spoken narratives are presented to each ear simultaneously (dichotic listening), the resulting cortical neural activity precisely encodes the acoustic features of both of the spoken narratives, but slightly weakened and delayed compared with the monaural response. Critically, the early sensory response to the attended speech is considerably stronger than that to the unattended speech, demonstrating top-down attentional gain control. This attentional gain is substantial even during the subjects' very first exposure to the speech mixture and therefore largely independent of knowledge of the speech content. Together, these findings characterize how the spectrotemporal features of speech are encoded in human auditory cortex and establish a single-trial-based paradigm to study the neural basis underlying the cocktail party phenomenon.read more
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
Cortical tracking of multiple streams outside the focus of attention in naturalistic auditory scenes.
TL;DR: The results reveal an important role of acoustical properties for the cortical segregation of unattended auditory streams in natural listening situations and corroborate the notion that selective attention contributes functionally to cortical stream segregation.
Journal ArticleDOI
EEG can predict speech intelligibility.
Ivan Iotzov,Lucas C. Parra +1 more
TL;DR: It is concluded that simultaneous recordings of the perceived sound and the corresponding EEG response may be a practical tool to assess speech intelligibility in the context of hearing aids.
Book ChapterDOI
Auditory Object Formation and Selection
TL;DR: This chapter considers how the brain may implement object formation and object selection and focuses on how different regions of the brain cooperate to isolate the neural representation of sound coming from a source of interest and enhance it while suppressing the responses to distracting or unimportant sounds in a sound mixture.
Journal ArticleDOI
Cortical entrainment: what we can learn from studying naturalistic speech perception
TL;DR: The view that naturalistic experimental paradigms, utilising spontaneously produced speech as stimuli and suitable frequency-domain methodological tools, should be used to address an important question that remains open: whether cortical entrainment is observed during speech perception and comprehension in real-life communicative situations is advanced.
Journal ArticleDOI
Hearing in noisy environments: noise invariance and contrast gain control
TL;DR: In addition to noise invariance, contrast gain control provides a variety of computational advantages over static neuronal representations; it makes efficient use of neuronal dynamic range, may contribute to redundancy‐reducing, sparse codes for sound and allows for simpler decoding of population responses.
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