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Semantic context enhances neural envelope tracking

View ORCID ProfileEline Verschueren, View ORCID ProfileJonas Vanthornhout, View ORCID ProfileTom Francart
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/421727
Eline Verschueren
aResearch Group Experimental Oto-rhino-laryngology (ExpORL), Department of Neurosciences, KU Leuven - University of Leuven, 3000 Leuven, Belgium
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Jonas Vanthornhout
aResearch Group Experimental Oto-rhino-laryngology (ExpORL), Department of Neurosciences, KU Leuven - University of Leuven, 3000 Leuven, Belgium
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Tom Francart
aResearch Group Experimental Oto-rhino-laryngology (ExpORL), Department of Neurosciences, KU Leuven - University of Leuven, 3000 Leuven, Belgium
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  • For correspondence: eline.verschueren@kuleuven.be
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ABSTRACT

The speech envelope is known to be essential for speech understanding and can be reconstructed from the electroencephalography (EEG) signal in response to running speech. Today, the factors influencing this neural tracking of the speech envelope are still under debate. Is envelope tracking mainly related to the encoding of acoustic speech information or is it influenced by top-down processing of speech understanding and the availability of semantic context in the stimulus?

We recorded the EEG in 19 normal-hearing participants while they listened to two types of stimuli: concatenated Matrix sentences without contextual information and a coherent story. Each stimulus was presented with varying levels of background noise to vary speech understanding. The speech envelope was reconstructed from the EEG in both the delta (0.5-4 Hz) and the theta (4-8 Hz) band with the use of a linear decoder and then correlated with the real speech envelope in that band. We also conducted a spatiotemporal analysis using temporal response functions (TRFs).

For both stimulus types and filter bands the correlation between the speech envelope and the reconstructed envelope increased with increasing speech understanding. In addition, correlations were higher for the story compared to the Matrix sentences, indicating that neural envelope tracking may be enhanced by the availability of semantic context in the stimulus and speech understanding.

Acknowledgements

This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 637424 to Tom Francart). Further support came from KU Leuven Special Research Fund under grant OT/14/119. Research of Jonas Vanthornhout and Eline Verschueren is funded by a PhD grant of the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO).

Footnotes

  • Conflict of interest: The authors declare no competing financial interests.

Copyright 
The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. All rights reserved. No reuse allowed without permission.
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Posted September 19, 2018.
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Semantic context enhances neural envelope tracking
Eline Verschueren, Jonas Vanthornhout, Tom Francart
bioRxiv 421727; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/421727
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Semantic context enhances neural envelope tracking
Eline Verschueren, Jonas Vanthornhout, Tom Francart
bioRxiv 421727; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/421727

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