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The influence of auditory attention on rhythmic speech entrainment

View ORCID ProfileRodika Sokoliuk, Giulio Degano, View ORCID ProfileLucia Melloni, View ORCID ProfileUta Noppeney, Damian Cruse
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.30.070318
Rodika Sokoliuk
1School of Psychology, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, England, B15 2TT
2Centre for Human Brain Health, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, England, B15 2TT
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  • For correspondence: rodika.sokoliuk@gmail.com
Giulio Degano
1School of Psychology, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, England, B15 2TT
2Centre for Human Brain Health, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, England, B15 2TT
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Lucia Melloni
3Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Frankfurt, Germany
4New York University, New York, USA
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Uta Noppeney
5Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging, 6525 EN Nijmegen, The Netherlands
6Radboud University, 6525 XZ Nijmegen, The Netherlands
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Damian Cruse
1School of Psychology, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, England, B15 2TT
2Centre for Human Brain Health, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, England, B15 2TT
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ABSTRACT

Language comprehension relies on integrating words into progressively more complex structures, like phrases and sentences. This hierarchical structure building is reflected in rhythmic neural activity across multiple timescales in E/MEG (Ding et al., 2016, 2017).

How does selective attention across levels of the hierarchy influence the expression of these rhythms?

We investigated these questions in an EEG study of 72 healthy human volunteers listening to streams of monosyllabic isochronous English words that were either unrelated (scrambled condition) or composed of four-word-sequences building meaningful sentences (sentential condition). Importantly, there were no physical cues between four-word-sentences but boundaries were marked by syntactic structure and thematic role assignment. Participants were divided into three attention groups: from passive listening (passive group) to attending to individual words (word group) or sentences (sentence group). The passive and word group were naïve to the sentential structure of the stimulus material, while the sentence group were not.

We found significant entrainment at word- and sentence rate across all three groups, with sentence entrainment linked to left middle temporal gyrus and right superior temporal gyrus. Goal-directed attention to words did not enhance word-rate-entrainment suggesting that word entrainment relies on largely automatic mechanisms. Importantly, goal-directed attention to sentences relative to words significantly increased sentence-rate-entrainment over left inferior frontal gyrus. This attentional modulation of rhythmic EEG activity at the sentential level highlights the role of attention in integrating individual words into complex linguistic structures.

SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Neural activity is known to entrain to physical characteristics of auditory stimuli. However, entrainment also occurs with structures lacking physical cues but rather require comprehension of the stimulus’ meaning – for example, entrainment to sentences in speech even without acoustic gaps separating these higher linguistic structures.

We investigated how goal-directed attention to low-level (words) and high-level (sentences) linguistic structures influences entrainment strength. Whilst sentence entrainment occurred independently of selective attention, it increased with goal-directed attention towards sentences. Conversely, no such attentional effect was found for word entrainment.

While goal-directed attention towards sentences strengthens entrainment, it is no prerequisite for it to occur, suggesting that low attentional effort is required for sentence comprehension, potentially reflecting the importance of speech in humans.

Competing Interest Statement

The authors have declared no competing interest.

Footnotes

  • Conflict of interest: The authors claim no conflict of interest.

Copyright 
The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license.
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Posted May 02, 2020.
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The influence of auditory attention on rhythmic speech entrainment
Rodika Sokoliuk, Giulio Degano, Lucia Melloni, Uta Noppeney, Damian Cruse
bioRxiv 2020.04.30.070318; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.30.070318
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The influence of auditory attention on rhythmic speech entrainment
Rodika Sokoliuk, Giulio Degano, Lucia Melloni, Uta Noppeney, Damian Cruse
bioRxiv 2020.04.30.070318; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.30.070318

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