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  1. Article: Neural Tracking Measures of Speech Intelligibility: Manipulating Intelligibility while Keeping Acoustics Unchanged.

    Karunathilake, I M Dushyanthi / Kulasingham, Joshua P / Simon, Jonathan Z

    bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology

    2023  

    Abstract: Neural speech tracking has advanced our understanding of how our brains rapidly map an acoustic speech signal onto linguistic representations and ultimately meaning. It remains unclear, however, how speech intelligibility is related to the corresponding ... ...

    Abstract Neural speech tracking has advanced our understanding of how our brains rapidly map an acoustic speech signal onto linguistic representations and ultimately meaning. It remains unclear, however, how speech intelligibility is related to the corresponding neural responses. Many studies addressing this question vary the level of intelligibility by manipulating the acoustic waveform, but this makes it difficult to cleanly disentangle effects of intelligibility from underlying acoustical confounds. Here, using magnetoencephalography (MEG) recordings, we study neural measures of speech intelligibility by manipulating intelligibility while keeping the acoustics strictly unchanged. Acoustically identical degraded speech stimuli (three-band noise vocoded, ~20 s duration) are presented twice, but the second presentation is preceded by the original (non-degraded) version of the speech. This intermediate priming, which generates a 'pop-out' percept, substantially improves the intelligibility of the second degraded speech passage. We investigate how intelligibility and acoustical structure affects acoustic and linguistic neural representations using multivariate Temporal Response Functions (mTRFs). As expected, behavioral results confirm that perceived speech clarity is improved by priming. TRF analysis reveals that auditory (speech envelope and envelope onset) neural representations are not affected by priming, but only by the acoustics of the stimuli (bottom-up driven). Critically, our findings suggest that segmentation of sounds into words emerges with better speech intelligibility, and most strongly at the later (~400 ms latency) word processing stage, in prefrontal cortex (PFC), in line with engagement of top-down mechanisms associated with priming. Taken together, our results show that word representations may provide some objective measures of speech comprehension.
    Language English
    Publishing date 2023-10-09
    Publishing country United States
    Document type Preprint
    DOI 10.1101/2023.05.18.541269
    Database MEDical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System OnLINE

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  2. Article ; Online: Neural tracking measures of speech intelligibility: Manipulating intelligibility while keeping acoustics unchanged.

    Karunathilake, I M Dushyanthi / Kulasingham, Joshua P / Simon, Jonathan Z

    Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America

    2023  Volume 120, Issue 49, Page(s) e2309166120

    Abstract: Neural speech tracking has advanced our understanding of how our brains rapidly map an acoustic speech signal onto linguistic representations and ultimately meaning. It remains unclear, however, how speech intelligibility is related to the corresponding ... ...

    Abstract Neural speech tracking has advanced our understanding of how our brains rapidly map an acoustic speech signal onto linguistic representations and ultimately meaning. It remains unclear, however, how speech intelligibility is related to the corresponding neural responses. Many studies addressing this question vary the level of intelligibility by manipulating the acoustic waveform, but this makes it difficult to cleanly disentangle the effects of intelligibility from underlying acoustical confounds. Here, using magnetoencephalography recordings, we study neural measures of speech intelligibility by manipulating intelligibility while keeping the acoustics strictly unchanged. Acoustically identical degraded speech stimuli (three-band noise-vocoded, ~20 s duration) are presented twice, but the second presentation is preceded by the original (nondegraded) version of the speech. This intermediate priming, which generates a "pop-out" percept, substantially improves the intelligibility of the second degraded speech passage. We investigate how intelligibility and acoustical structure affect acoustic and linguistic neural representations using multivariate temporal response functions (mTRFs). As expected, behavioral results confirm that perceived speech clarity is improved by priming. mTRFs analysis reveals that auditory (speech envelope and envelope onset) neural representations are not affected by priming but only by the acoustics of the stimuli (bottom-up driven). Critically, our findings suggest that segmentation of sounds into words emerges with better speech intelligibility, and most strongly at the later (~400 ms latency) word processing stage, in prefrontal cortex, in line with engagement of top-down mechanisms associated with priming. Taken together, our results show that word representations may provide some objective measures of speech comprehension.
    MeSH term(s) Speech Intelligibility/physiology ; Acoustic Stimulation/methods ; Speech/physiology ; Noise ; Acoustics ; Magnetoencephalography/methods ; Speech Perception/physiology
    Language English
    Publishing date 2023-11-30
    Publishing country United States
    Document type Journal Article
    ZDB-ID 209104-5
    ISSN 1091-6490 ; 0027-8424
    ISSN (online) 1091-6490
    ISSN 0027-8424
    DOI 10.1073/pnas.2309166120
    Database MEDical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System OnLINE

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  3. Article: Neural Dynamics of the Processing of Speech Features: Evidence for a Progression of Features from Acoustic to Sentential Processing.

    Karunathilake, I M Dushyanthi / Brodbeck, Christian / Bhattasali, Shohini / Resnik, Philip / Simon, Jonathan Z

    bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology

    2024  

    Abstract: When we listen to speech, our brain's neurophysiological responses "track" its acoustic features, but it is less well understood how these auditory responses are modulated by linguistic content. Here, we recorded magnetoencephalography (MEG) responses ... ...

    Abstract When we listen to speech, our brain's neurophysiological responses "track" its acoustic features, but it is less well understood how these auditory responses are modulated by linguistic content. Here, we recorded magnetoencephalography (MEG) responses while subjects listened to four types of continuous-speech-like passages: speech-envelope modulated noise, English-like non-words, scrambled words, and narrative passage. Temporal response function (TRF) analysis provides strong neural evidence for the emergent features of speech processing in cortex, from acoustics to higher-level linguistics, as incremental steps in neural speech processing. Critically, we show a stepwise hierarchical progression of progressively higher order features over time, reflected in both bottom-up (early) and top-down (late) processing stages. Linguistically driven top-down mechanisms take the form of late N400-like responses, suggesting a central role of predictive coding mechanisms at multiple levels. As expected, the neural processing of lower-level acoustic feature responses is bilateral or right lateralized, with left lateralization emerging only for lexical-semantic features. Finally, our results identify potential neural markers of the computations underlying speech perception and comprehension.
    Language English
    Publishing date 2024-02-02
    Publishing country United States
    Document type Preprint
    DOI 10.1101/2024.02.02.578603
    Database MEDical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System OnLINE

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  4. Article ; Online: Effects of aging on cortical representations of continuous speech.

    Karunathilake, I M Dushyanthi / Dunlap, Jason L / Perera, Janani / Presacco, Alessandro / Decruy, Lien / Anderson, Samira / Kuchinsky, Stefanie E / Simon, Jonathan Z

    Journal of neurophysiology

    2023  Volume 129, Issue 6, Page(s) 1359–1377

    Abstract: Understanding speech in a noisy environment is crucial in day-to-day interactions and yet becomes more challenging with age, even for healthy aging. Age-related changes in the neural mechanisms that enable speech-in-noise listening have been investigated ...

    Abstract Understanding speech in a noisy environment is crucial in day-to-day interactions and yet becomes more challenging with age, even for healthy aging. Age-related changes in the neural mechanisms that enable speech-in-noise listening have been investigated previously; however, the extent to which age affects the timing and fidelity of encoding of target and interfering speech streams is not well understood. Using magnetoencephalography (MEG), we investigated how continuous speech is represented in auditory cortex in the presence of interfering speech in younger and older adults. Cortical representations were obtained from neural responses that time-locked to the speech envelopes with speech envelope reconstruction and temporal response functions (TRFs). TRFs showed three prominent peaks corresponding to auditory cortical processing stages: early (∼50 ms), middle (∼100 ms), and late (∼200 ms). Older adults showed exaggerated speech envelope representations compared with younger adults. Temporal analysis revealed both that the age-related exaggeration starts as early as ∼50 ms and that older adults needed a substantially longer integration time window to achieve their better reconstruction of the speech envelope. As expected, with increased speech masking envelope reconstruction for the attended talker decreased and all three TRF peaks were delayed, with aging contributing additionally to the reduction. Interestingly, for older adults the late peak was delayed, suggesting that this late peak may receive contributions from multiple sources. Together these results suggest that there are several mechanisms at play compensating for age-related temporal processing deficits at several stages but which are not able to fully reestablish unimpaired speech perception.
    MeSH term(s) Speech/physiology ; Auditory Perception ; Noise ; Speech Perception/physiology ; Acoustic Stimulation/methods
    Language English
    Publishing date 2023-04-25
    Publishing country United States
    Document type Journal Article ; Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural
    ZDB-ID 80161-6
    ISSN 1522-1598 ; 0022-3077
    ISSN (online) 1522-1598
    ISSN 0022-3077
    DOI 10.1152/jn.00356.2022
    Database MEDical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System OnLINE

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