Synchronous, but not Entrained: Exogenous and Endogenous Cortical Rhythms of Speech and Language Processing

Meyer, Lars; Sun, Yue; Martin, Andrea E.

doi:10.31234/osf.io/4s83k

2019

DOI: 10.31234/osf.io/4s83k

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Synchronous, but not Entrained: Exogenous and Endogenous Cortical Rhythms of Speech and Language Processing

Lars Meyer

Yue Sun

Andrea E. Martin

Abstract: Research on speech processing is often focused on a phenomenon termed "entrainment", whereby the cortex shadows rhythmic acoustic information with oscillatory activity. Entrainment has been observed to a range of rhythms present in speech; in addition, synchronicity with abstract information (e.g. syntactic structures) has been observed. Entrainment accounts face two challenges: First, speech is not exactly rhythmic; second, synchronicity with representations that lack a clear acoustic counterpart has been des… Show more

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2020

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Cited by 10 publications

References 37 publications

(41 reference statements)

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A silent disco: Differential effects of beat-based and pattern-based temporal expectations on persistent entrainment of low-frequency neural oscillations

Bouwer¹,

Fahrenfort²,

Millard³

et al. 2020

Preprint

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Psychology, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (h.a.slagter@vu.nl). AbstractTemporal expectations (e.g., predicting "when") facilitate sensory processing, and are suggested to rely on entrainment of low frequency neural oscillations to regular rhythmic input.However, temporal expectations can be formed not only in response to a regular beat, such as in music ("beat-based" expectations), but also based on a predictable pattern of temporal intervals of different durations ("memory-based" expectations). Here, we examined the neural mechanisms underlying beat-based and memory-based expectations, by assessing EEG activity and behavioral responses during silent periods following rhythmic auditory sequences that allowed for beat-based or memory-based expectations, or had random timing. In Experiment 1 (N = 32), participants rated how well probe tones at various time points fitted the previous rhythm. Beat-based expectations affected fitness ratings for at least two beat-cycles, while the effects of memory-based expectations subsided after the first expected time point in the silence window. In Experiment 2 (N = 27), using EEG, we found a CNV following the final tones of memory-based and random, but not beat-based sequences, suggesting that climbing neuronal activity may specifically reflect memory-based expectations. Moreover, we found enhanced power in the EEG signal at the beat frequency for beat-based sequences both during listening and the silence. For memory-based sequences, we found enhanced power at a frequency inherent to the memory-based pattern only during listening, but not during the silence, suggesting that ongoing entrainment of low frequency oscillations may be specific to beatbased expectations. Finally, using multivariate pattern decoding on the raw EEG data, we could classify above chance from the silence which type of sequence participants had heard before.Together, our results suggest that beat-based and memory-based expectations rely on entrainment and climbing neuronal activity, respectively.

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A silent disco: Differential effects of beat-based and pattern-based temporal expectations on persistent entrainment of low-frequency neural oscillations

Bouwer¹,

Fahrenfort²,

Millard³

et al. 2020

Preprint

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Linguistic structure and meaning organize neural oscillations into a content-specific hierarchy

Kaufeld

Bosker

Alday

et al. 2020

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Short title: Structure and meaning organize neural oscillationsThe authors declare no competing financial interests. Significance StatementBiological systems like the brain encode their environment not only by reacting in a series of stimulus-driven responses, but by combining stimulus-driven information with internally generated, inferential knowledge and meaning. Understanding language from speech is the human benchmark for this. Much research focusses on the purely stimulus-driven response, but here, we focus on the goal of language behavior: conveying structure and meaning. To that end, we use naturalistic stimuli that contrast acoustic-prosodic and lexical-semantic information to show that, during spoken language comprehension, oscillatory modulations reflect computations related to inferring structure and meaning from the acoustic signal. Our experiment provides the first evidence to date that compositional structure and meaning organize the oscillatory response, above and beyond acoustic and lexical controls.

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Auditory detection is modulated by theta phase of silent lip movements

Biau

Wang

Park

et al. 2020

Preprint

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SUMMARYAudiovisual speech perception relies on our expertise to map a speaker’s lip movements with speech sounds. This multimodal matching is facilitated by salient syllable features that align lip movements and acoustic envelope signals in the 4 – 8 Hz theta band (Chandrasekaran et al., 2009). The predominance of theta rhythms in speech processing has been firmly established by studies showing that neural oscillations track the acoustic envelope in the primary auditory cortex (Giraud & Poeppel, 2012). Equivalently, theta oscillations in the visual cortex entrain to lip movements (Park et al., 2016), and the auditory cortex is recruited during silent speech perception (Bourguignon et al., 2020; Cross et al., 2019; Calvert et al., 1997). These findings suggest that neuronal theta oscillations play a functional role in organising information flow across visual and auditory sensory areas. We presented silent speech movies while participants performed a pure tone detection task to test whether entrainment to lip movements enslaves the auditory system and drives behavioural outcomes. We showed that auditory detection varied depending on the ongoing theta phase conveyed by lip movements in the movies. In a complementary experiment presenting the same movies while recording participants’ electro-encephalogram (EEG), we found that silent lip movements entrained neural oscillations in the visual and auditory cortices with the visual phase leading the auditory phase. These results support the idea that the visual cortex entrained by lip movements increases the sensitivity of the auditory cortex at relevant time-windows for speech comprehension as a filtering modulator relying on theta phase synchronisation.

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Synchronous, but not Entrained: Exogenous and Endogenous Cortical Rhythms of Speech and Language Processing

Cited by 10 publications

References 37 publications

A silent disco: Differential effects of beat-based and pattern-based temporal expectations on persistent entrainment of low-frequency neural oscillations

A silent disco: Differential effects of beat-based and pattern-based temporal expectations on persistent entrainment of low-frequency neural oscillations

Linguistic structure and meaning organize neural oscillations into a content-specific hierarchy

Auditory detection is modulated by theta phase of silent lip movements

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