EEG oscillations entrain their phase to high-level features of speech sound

Zoefel, Benedikt; VanRullen, Rufin

doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2015.08.054

Cited by 109 publications

(133 citation statements)

References 62 publications

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“…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.…”

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confidence: 77%

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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confidence: 77%

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

Kösem

Basirat

Azizi

et al. 2016

Journal of Neurophysiology

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“…In a multi-speaker scenario or when speech is mixed with noise, the alignment between these oscillations and the envelope of speech is increased for attended speech, suggesting a mechanism of auditory stream selection (Ding and Simon, 2013; Zion Golumbic et al, 2013). Entrainment to speech persists even when slow spectral energy fluctuations have been removed, and this phenomenon can be observed in both humans and non-human primates (Zoefel and VanRullen, 2015a,b,c; Zoefel et al, 2017). Thus, as suggested before (e.g., Schroeder and Lakatos, 2009), phase entrainment might be one of the key features of stimulus selection in the auditory system.…”

Section: Relation To the System's Inputmentioning

confidence: 99%

Oscillatory Mechanisms of Stimulus Processing and Selection in the Visual and Auditory Systems: State-of-the-Art, Speculations and Suggestions

Zoefel¹,

VanRullen²

2017

Front. Neurosci.

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All sensory systems need to continuously prioritize and select incoming stimuli in order to avoid overflow or interference, and provide a structure to the brain's input. However, the characteristics of this input differ across sensory systems; therefore, and as a direct consequence, each sensory system might have developed specialized strategies to cope with the continuous stream of incoming information. Neural oscillations are intimately connected with this selection process, as they can be used by the brain to rhythmically amplify or attenuate input and therefore represent an optimal tool for stimulus selection. In this paper, we focus on oscillatory processes for stimulus selection in the visual and auditory systems. We point out both commonalities and differences between the two systems and develop several hypotheses, inspired by recently published findings: (1) The rhythmic component in its input is crucial for the auditory, but not for the visual system. The alignment between oscillatory phase and rhythmic input (phase entrainment) is therefore an integral part of stimulus selection in the auditory system whereas the visual system merely adjusts its phase to upcoming events, without the need for any rhythmic component. (2) When input is unpredictable, the visual system can maintain its oscillatory sampling, whereas the auditory system switches to a different, potentially internally oriented, “mode” of processing that might be characterized by alpha oscillations. (3) Visual alpha can be divided into a faster occipital alpha (10 Hz) and a slower frontal alpha (7 Hz) that critically depends on attention.

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“…Recent works on speech perception have focused on phase entrainment (Ahissar et al, 2001; Luo and Poeppel, 2007; Aiken and Picton, 2008; Nourski et al, 2009; Ding and Simon, 2013, 2014; Doelling et al, 2014; Zoefel and VanRullen, 2015, 2016). Cortical entrainment to the envelope of speech has been investigated by using magnetoencephalogram (MEG) (Ahissar et al, 2001), electroencelphalogram (EEG) (Aiken and Picton, 2008), and electrocorticogram (ECoG) (Nourski et al, 2009).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Familiarity Affects Entrainment of EEG in Music Listening

Kumagai

Arvaneh

Tanaka

2017

Front. Hum. Neurosci.

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Music perception involves complex brain functions. The relationship between music and brain such as cortical entrainment to periodic tune, periodic beat, and music have been well investigated. It has also been reported that the cerebral cortex responded more strongly to the periodic rhythm of unfamiliar music than to that of familiar music. However, previous works mainly used simple and artificial auditory stimuli like pure tone or beep. It is still unclear how the brain response is influenced by the familiarity of music. To address this issue, we analyzed electroencelphalogram (EEG) to investigate the relationship between cortical response and familiarity of music using melodies produced by piano sounds as simple natural stimuli. The cross-correlation function averaged across trials, channels, and participants showed two pronounced peaks at time lags around 70 and 140 ms. At the two peaks the magnitude of the cross-correlation values were significantly larger when listening to unfamiliar and scrambled music compared to those when listening to familiar music. Our findings suggest that the response to unfamiliar music is stronger than that to familiar music. One potential application of our findings would be the discrimination of listeners' familiarity with music, which provides an important tool for assessment of brain activity.

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EEG oscillations entrain their phase to high-level features of speech sound

Cited by 109 publications

References 62 publications

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

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

Oscillatory Mechanisms of Stimulus Processing and Selection in the Visual and Auditory Systems: State-of-the-Art, Speculations and Suggestions

Familiarity Affects Entrainment of EEG in Music Listening

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