Acoustic landmarks drive delta-theta oscillations to enable speech comprehension by facilitating perceptual parsing

By Keith B. Doelling, Luc H. Arnal, Oded Ghitza, David Poeppel. NeuroImage, 2013

516 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A growing body of research suggests that intrinsic neuronal slow (< 10 Hz) oscillations in auditory cortex appear to track incoming speech and other spectro-temporally complex auditory signals. Within this framework, several recent studies have identified critical-band temporal envelopes as the specific acoustic feature being reflected by the phase of these oscillations. However, how this alignment between speech acoustics and neural oscillations might underpin intelligibility is unclear. Here we test the hypothesis that the ‘sharpness’ of temporal fluctuations in the critical band envelope acts as a temporal cue to speech syllabic rate, driving delta-theta rhythms to track the stimulus and facilitate intelligibility. We interpret our findings as evidence that sharp events in the stimulus cause cortical rhythms to re-align and parse the stimulus into syllable-sized chunks for further decoding. Using magnetoencephalographic recordings, we show that by removing temporal fluctuations that occur at the syllabic rate, envelope-tracking activity is reduced. By artificially reinstating these temporal fluctuations, envelope-tracking activity is regained. These changes in tracking correlate with intelligibility of the stimulus. Together, the results suggest that the sharpness of fluctuations in the stimulus, as reflected in the cochlear output, drive oscillatory activity to track and entrain to the stimulus, at its syllabic rate. This process likely facilitates parsing of the stimulus into meaningful chunks appropriate for subsequent decoding, enhancing perception and intelligibility.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Signal Processing

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4ca7678795ce47626780688ce4c10b398a67f938

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Citations in the corpus

Distinct contributions of low- and high-frequency neural oscillations to speech comprehension (2017, methodology): “…results, either associating stronger low-frequency entrainment with improved speech intelligibility (Ahissar et al., 2001; Ding & Simon, 2013a; Doelling et al., 2014; Gross et al., 2013; Peelle, Gross, & Davis, 2013; Pérez, Carreiras, Gillon Dowens, & Duñabeitia, 2015; Rimmele, Zion Golumbic,…”
Cortical encoding of probabilistic temporal predictions during speech perception (2026, unknown): “The predictions derived from the PDF and HR models were signiﬁcantly encoded, in line with the established role of rhythm in sensory (20, 33) and, speciﬁcally, speech processing (12, 62).”
The human auditory cortex concurrently tracks syllabic and phonemic timescales via acoustic spectral flux (2024, unknown): “In this view, theta activity reflects syllabic parsing (flexible tracking), while low-gamma activity reflects a basic sampling phenomenon (at a fixed rate) of the ongoing acoustic input to extract phonetic features, on the basis of the syllabic frame ( 6 , 38 , 52 ).”
Speech and music recruit frequency-specific distributed and overlapping cortical networks (2024, methodology): “Abbreviations according to the Brainnetome Atlas (Fan et al., 2016).”
Unified Coding of Spectral and Temporal Phonetic Cues: Electrophysiological Evidence for Abstract Phonological Features (2021, background): “That is, abstract characteristics of the speech sound representation are being predicted, perhaps demonstrating an instance of “what” cortical hypothesis generation (Doelling et al., 2014).”