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Baus C, Millan I, Chen XJ, Blanco-Elorrieta E. Exploring the Interplay Between Language Comprehension and Cortical Tracking: The Bilingual Test Case. NEUROBIOLOGY OF LANGUAGE (CAMBRIDGE, MASS.) 2024; 5:484-496. [PMID: 38911463 PMCID: PMC11192516 DOI: 10.1162/nol_a_00141] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 01/10/2024] [Accepted: 03/04/2024] [Indexed: 06/25/2024]
Abstract
Cortical tracking, the synchronization of brain activity to linguistic rhythms is a well-established phenomenon. However, its nature has been heavily contested: Is it purely epiphenomenal or does it play a fundamental role in speech comprehension? Previous research has used intelligibility manipulations to examine this topic. Here, we instead varied listeners' language comprehension skills while keeping the auditory stimulus constant. To do so, we tested 22 native English speakers and 22 Spanish/Catalan bilinguals learning English as a second language (SL) in an EEG cortical entrainment experiment and correlated the responses with the magnitude of the N400 component of a semantic comprehension task. As expected, native listeners effectively tracked sentential, phrasal, and syllabic linguistic structures. In contrast, SL listeners exhibited limitations in tracking sentential structures but successfully tracked phrasal and syllabic rhythms. Importantly, the amplitude of the neural entrainment correlated with the amplitude of the detection of semantic incongruities in SLs, showing a direct connection between tracking and the ability to understand speech. Together, these findings shed light on the interplay between language comprehension and cortical tracking, to identify neural entrainment as a fundamental principle for speech comprehension.
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Affiliation(s)
- Cristina Baus
- Department of Cognition, Development and Educational Psychology, University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain
- Institute of Neurosciences, University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain
| | | | | | - Esti Blanco-Elorrieta
- Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, NY, USA
- Department of Neural Science, New York University, New York, NY, USA
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Zoefel B, Kösem A. Neural tracking of continuous acoustics: properties, speech-specificity and open questions. Eur J Neurosci 2024; 59:394-414. [PMID: 38151889 DOI: 10.1111/ejn.16221] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 06/27/2023] [Revised: 11/17/2023] [Accepted: 11/22/2023] [Indexed: 12/29/2023]
Abstract
Human speech is a particularly relevant acoustic stimulus for our species, due to its role of information transmission during communication. Speech is inherently a dynamic signal, and a recent line of research focused on neural activity following the temporal structure of speech. We review findings that characterise neural dynamics in the processing of continuous acoustics and that allow us to compare these dynamics with temporal aspects in human speech. We highlight properties and constraints that both neural and speech dynamics have, suggesting that auditory neural systems are optimised to process human speech. We then discuss the speech-specificity of neural dynamics and their potential mechanistic origins and summarise open questions in the field.
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Affiliation(s)
- Benedikt Zoefel
- Centre de Recherche Cerveau et Cognition (CerCo), CNRS UMR 5549, Toulouse, France
- Université de Toulouse III Paul Sabatier, Toulouse, France
| | - Anne Kösem
- Lyon Neuroscience Research Center (CRNL), INSERM U1028, Bron, France
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Kösem A, Dai B, McQueen JM, Hagoort P. Neural tracking of speech envelope does not unequivocally reflect intelligibility. Neuroimage 2023; 272:120040. [PMID: 36935084 DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2023.120040] [Citation(s) in RCA: 6] [Impact Index Per Article: 6.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 09/06/2022] [Revised: 03/13/2023] [Accepted: 03/15/2023] [Indexed: 03/19/2023] Open
Abstract
During listening, brain activity tracks the rhythmic structures of speech signals. Here, we directly dissociated the contribution of neural envelope tracking in the processing of speech acoustic cues from that related to linguistic processing. We examined the neural changes associated with the comprehension of Noise-Vocoded (NV) speech using magnetoencephalography (MEG). Participants listened to NV sentences in a 3-phase training paradigm: (1) pre-training, where NV stimuli were barely comprehended, (2) training with exposure of the original clear version of speech stimulus, and (3) post-training, where the same stimuli gained intelligibility from the training phase. Using this paradigm, we tested if the neural responses of a speech signal was modulated by its intelligibility without any change in its acoustic structure. To test the influence of spectral degradation on neural envelope tracking independently of training, participants listened to two types of NV sentences (4-band and 2-band NV speech), but were only trained to understand 4-band NV speech. Significant changes in neural tracking were observed in the delta range in relation to the acoustic degradation of speech. However, we failed to find a direct effect of intelligibility on the neural tracking of speech envelope in both theta and delta ranges, in both auditory regions-of-interest and whole-brain sensor-space analyses. This suggests that acoustics greatly influence the neural tracking response to speech envelope, and that caution needs to be taken when choosing the control signals for speech-brain tracking analyses, considering that a slight change in acoustic parameters can have strong effects on the neural tracking response.
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Affiliation(s)
- Anne Kösem
- Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, 6500 AH Nijmegen, The Netherlands; Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University, 6500 HB Nijmegen, The Netherlands; Lyon Neuroscience Research Center (CRNL), CoPhy Team, INSERM U1028, 69500 Bron, France.
| | - Bohan Dai
- Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, 6500 AH Nijmegen, The Netherlands; Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University, 6500 HB Nijmegen, The Netherlands
| | - James M McQueen
- Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, 6500 AH Nijmegen, The Netherlands; Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University, 6500 HB Nijmegen, The Netherlands
| | - Peter Hagoort
- Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, 6500 AH Nijmegen, The Netherlands; Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University, 6500 HB Nijmegen, The Netherlands
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Niesen M, Bourguignon M, Bertels J, Vander Ghinst M, Wens V, Goldman S, De Tiège X. Cortical tracking of lexical speech units in a multi-talker background is immature in school-aged children. Neuroimage 2023; 265:119770. [PMID: 36462732 DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2022.119770] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 03/28/2022] [Revised: 11/09/2022] [Accepted: 11/23/2022] [Indexed: 12/03/2022] Open
Abstract
Children have more difficulty perceiving speech in noise than adults. Whether this difficulty relates to an immature processing of prosodic or linguistic elements of the attended speech is still unclear. To address the impact of noise on linguistic processing per se, we assessed how babble noise impacts the cortical tracking of intelligible speech devoid of prosody in school-aged children and adults. Twenty adults and twenty children (7-9 years) listened to synthesized French monosyllabic words presented at 2.5 Hz, either randomly or in 4-word hierarchical structures wherein 2 words formed a phrase at 1.25 Hz, and 2 phrases formed a sentence at 0.625 Hz, with or without babble noise. Neuromagnetic responses to words, phrases and sentences were identified and source-localized. Children and adults displayed significant cortical tracking of words in all conditions, and of phrases and sentences only when words formed meaningful sentences. In children compared with adults, the cortical tracking was lower for all linguistic units in conditions without noise. In the presence of noise, the cortical tracking was similarly reduced for sentence units in both groups, but remained stable for phrase units. Critically, when there was noise, adults increased the cortical tracking of monosyllabic words in the inferior frontal gyri and supratemporal auditory cortices but children did not. This study demonstrates that the difficulties of school-aged children in understanding speech in a multi-talker background might be partly due to an immature tracking of lexical but not supra-lexical linguistic units.
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Affiliation(s)
- Maxime Niesen
- Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB), UNI - ULB Neurosciences Institute, Laboratoire de Neuroanatomie et de Neuroimagerie translationnelles (LN2T), 1070 Brussels, Belgium; Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Hôpital Universitaire de Bruxelles (HUB), CUB Hôpital Erasme, Department of Otorhinolaryngology, 1070 Brussels, Belgium.
| | - Mathieu Bourguignon
- Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB), UNI - ULB Neurosciences Institute, Laboratoire de Neuroanatomie et de Neuroimagerie translationnelles (LN2T), 1070 Brussels, Belgium; Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB), UNI-ULB Neuroscience Institute, Laboratory of Neurophysiology and Movement Biomechanics, 1070 Brussels, Belgium.; BCBL, Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, 20009 San Sebastian, Spain
| | - Julie Bertels
- Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB), UNI - ULB Neurosciences Institute, Laboratoire de Neuroanatomie et de Neuroimagerie translationnelles (LN2T), 1070 Brussels, Belgium; Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB), UNI-ULB Neuroscience Institute, Cognition and Computation group, ULBabyLab - Consciousness, Brussels, Belgium
| | - Marc Vander Ghinst
- Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB), UNI - ULB Neurosciences Institute, Laboratoire de Neuroanatomie et de Neuroimagerie translationnelles (LN2T), 1070 Brussels, Belgium; Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Hôpital Universitaire de Bruxelles (HUB), CUB Hôpital Erasme, Department of Otorhinolaryngology, 1070 Brussels, Belgium
| | - Vincent Wens
- Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB), UNI - ULB Neurosciences Institute, Laboratoire de Neuroanatomie et de Neuroimagerie translationnelles (LN2T), 1070 Brussels, Belgium; Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Hôpital Universitaire de Bruxelles (HUB), CUB Hôpital Erasme, Department of translational Neuroimaging, 1070 Brussels, Belgium
| | - Serge Goldman
- Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB), UNI - ULB Neurosciences Institute, Laboratoire de Neuroanatomie et de Neuroimagerie translationnelles (LN2T), 1070 Brussels, Belgium; Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Hôpital Universitaire de Bruxelles (HUB), CUB Hôpital Erasme, Department of Nuclear Medicine, 1070 Brussels, Belgium
| | - Xavier De Tiège
- Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB), UNI - ULB Neurosciences Institute, Laboratoire de Neuroanatomie et de Neuroimagerie translationnelles (LN2T), 1070 Brussels, Belgium; Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Hôpital Universitaire de Bruxelles (HUB), CUB Hôpital Erasme, Department of translational Neuroimaging, 1070 Brussels, Belgium
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