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Attention modulates ‘speech-tracking’ at a cocktail party

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Recent findings by Mesgarani and Chang demonstrate that signals in auditory cortex can reconstruct the spectrotemporal patterns of attended speech tokens better than those of ignored ones. These results help extend the study of attention into the domain of natural speech, posing numerous questions and challenges for future research.

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  • Neurodevelopmental oscillatory basis of speech processing in noise

    2023, Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience
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    The effect of age for both phrasal and syllabic CTS appeared to be mainly explained by an anterior-to-posterior shift (of about 1 cm) of right-hemisphere sources from youngest (5–7 years) to oldest (18–27 years) age groups. Whether this shift reflects a genuine developmental effect is difficult to tell since changes in brain anatomy from childhood to adulthood induce small, but consistent, age-dependent errors in the normalization of individual brains to a template (Wilke et al., 2002). Besides these unclear effects of age, our results rather emphasize the close similarity in location of cortical generators of CTS across the investigated age range.

  • Comparing the potential of MEG and EEG to uncover brain tracking of speech temporal envelope

    2019, NeuroImage
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    In line with this view, speech brain tracking is stronger when listening to intelligible speech compared to non-intelligible speech (Ahissar et al., 2001; Luo and Poeppel, 2007; Peelle et al., 2013; Riecke et al., 2018), and delta fluctuations track sentence boundaries, even in the absence of prosodic cues (Ding et al., 2016; Meyer et al., 2017). Studies on speech brain tracking have also increased our understanding of the neural mechanisms subtending speech perception in adverse listening conditions (O'Sullivan et al., 2014; Ding and Simon, 2014; Riecke et al., 2018; Zion-Golumbic et al., 2013; Zion-Golumbic and Schroeder, 2012). Indeed, in cocktail-party conditions, 1) speech brain tracking at delta and theta frequencies is stronger with the attended speech (i.e., the sound subjects are attending to) than with the global sound (i.e., the attended speech and the noise combined) (Broderick et al., 2017; Ding and Simon, 2012; Fuglsang et al., 2017; Horton et al., 2013; Luo and Poeppel, 2007; Mesgarani and Chang, 2012; O'Sullivan et al., 2014; Puschmann et al., 2017; Rimmele et al., 2015; Simon, 2015; Vander Ghinst et al., 2016; Zion-Golumbic et al., 2013), 2) it decreases when the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) decreases (Giordano et al., 2016; Vander Ghinst et al., 2016 but see Ding and Simon, 2013 who found that speech brain tracking remains stable as long as speech is intelligible), 3) this dampening is more stringent in the right (vs. left) hemisphere at delta frequencies (Vander Ghinst et al., 2016), and 4) high-order brain regions track only the attended speech stream with no detectable trace of the unattended speech (Zion-Golumbic et al., 2013).

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