Exposing distinct subcortical components of the auditory brainstem response evoked by continuous naturalistic speech

Abstract

The auditory brainstem is important for processing speech, yet we have much to learn regarding the contributions of different subcortical structures. These deep neural generators respond quickly, making them difficult to study during dynamic, ongoing speech. Recently developed techniques have paved the way to use natural speech stimuli, but the auditory brainstem responses (ABRs) they provide are temporally broad and thus have ambiguous neural sources. Here we describe a new method that uses re-synthesized "peaky" speech stimuli and deconvolution analysis of EEG data to measure canonical ABRs to continuous naturalistic speech of male and female narrators. We show that in adults with normal hearing, peaky speech quickly yields robust ABRs that can be used to investigate speech processing at distinct subcortical structures from auditory nerve to rostral brainstem. We further demonstrate the versatility of peaky speech by simultaneously measuring bilateral and ear-specific responses across different frequency bands. Thus, the peaky speech method holds promise as a powerful tool for investigating speech processing and for clinical applications.

Linear superposition of responses evoked by individual glottal pulses explain over 80% of the frequency following response to human speech in the macaque monkey

“…Our findings extend this work into a higher frequency range and into the realm of spectro-temporally complex speech sounds. More recent work, conducted in parallel with studies reported here, has used a similar deconvolution approach to calculate the F0 response from continuous speech (Polonenko and Maddox, 2021). In line with our findings, they also identified F0 responses that are consistent with the notion of resulting from a sequential activation of generators along the ascending auditory pathway.…”

“…Furthermore, it should be possible to compute the underlying F0 responses by inverting the convolution operation. So-called 'deconvolution' approaches have successfully been used in a wide range of neuroscientific applications (Aquino et al, 2014;Teichert and Ferrera, 2015), including the closely related 40 Hz auditory steady state response (Bohórquez and Özdamar, 2008) and continuous speech (Maddox and Lee, 2018;Polonenko and Maddox, 2021). To date, however, deconvolution has never been used to recover the F0 response underlying FFRs to stimuli with time-varying pitch.…”

Neural activity during story listening is synchronized across individuals despite acoustic masking

“…Similarly, the spoken stories used here are intrinsically motivating to a listener, reflecting such everyday listening situations (Dunlop and Walker, 2013). Our work shows, in line with recent studies (Broderick et al, 2018(Broderick et al, , 2019(Broderick et al, , 2021Brodbeck et al, 2020;Erb et al, 2020;Polonenko and Maddox, 2021), that utilizing naturalistic, spoken stories to investigate speech listening provide a useful avenue to investigate listening in ecologically valid conditions.…”

Neural speech tracking shifts from the syllabic to the modulation rate of speech as intelligibility decreases

“…Recent studies using non-invasive electrophysiology have shown that auditory activity at putative subcortical processing stages can be measured for complex natural sounds (such as speech; [19][20][21][22]. Furthermore, this subcortical activity can even be modulated by attention (19,20,23).…”