The effects of selective attention and speech acoustics on neural speech-tracking in a multi-talker scene

Johanna M. Rimmele, Elana Zion Golumbic, Erich Schröger, David Poeppel

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

108 Scopus citations

Abstract

Attending to one speaker in multi-speaker situations is challenging. One neural mechanism proposed to underlie the ability to attend to a particular speaker is phase-locking of low-frequency activity in auditory cortex to speech's temporal envelope ("speech-tracking"), which is more precise for attended speech. However, it is not known what brings about this attentional effect, and specifically if it reflects enhanced processing of the fine structure of attended speech. To investigate this question we compared attentional effects on speech-tracking of natural versus vocoded speech which preserves the temporal envelope but removes the fine structure of speech. Pairs of natural and vocoded speech stimuli were presented concurrently and participants attended to one stimulus and performed a detection task while ignoring the other stimulus. We recorded magnetoencephalography (MEG) and compared attentional effects on the speech-tracking response in auditory cortex. Speech-tracking of natural, but not vocoded, speech was enhanced by attention, whereas neural tracking of ignored speech was similar for natural and vocoded speech. These findings suggest that the more precise speech-tracking of attended natural speech is related to processing its fine structure, possibly reflecting the application of higher-order linguistic processes. In contrast, when speech is unattended its fine structure is not processed to the same degree and thus elicits less precise speech-tracking more similar to vocoded speech.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)144-154
Number of pages11
JournalCortex
Volume68
DOIs
StatePublished - 1 Jul 2015

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2015 Elsevier Ltd.

Funding

This study was supported by the Erasmus Mundus Program of the European Union 2009-5259/003-001-EMA2 to JMR, the German Research Foundation SFB936/B2 to JMR, the I-CORE Program of the Planning and Budgeting Committee and The Israel Science Foundation (grant No. 51/11 ) to EZG, a DFG-Reinhart-Koselleck-grant to ES, and NIH 2R01DC05660 to DP.

FundersFunder number
National Institutes of Health
National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication DisordersR01DC005660
European Commission2009-5259/003-001-EMA2
Deutsche ForschungsgemeinschaftSFB936/B2
Israel Science Foundation51/11
Planning and Budgeting Committee of the Council for Higher Education of Israel

    Keywords

    • Auditory cortex
    • Fine structure
    • Linguistic
    • Predictions
    • Speech envelope

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