Abstract
EEG-based measures of neural tracking of natural running speech are becoming increasingly popular to investigate neural processing of speech and have applications in audiology. When the stimulus is a single speaker, it is usually assumed that the listener actively attends to and understands the stimulus. However, as the level of attention of the listener is inherently variable, we investigated how this affected neural envelope tracking. Using a movie as a distractor, we varied the level of attention while we estimated neural envelope tracking. We varied the intelligibility level by adding stationary noise. We found a significant difference in neural envelope tracking between the condition with maximal attention and the movie condition. This difference was most pronounced in the right-frontal region of the brain. The degree of neural envelope tracking was highly correlated with the stimulus signal-to-noise ratio, even in the movie condition. This could be due to residual neural resources to passively attend to the stimulus. When envelope tracking is used to measure speech understanding objectively, this means that the procedure can be made more enjoyable and feasible by letting participants watch a movie during stimulus presentation.
Highlights
EEG-based measures of neural tracking of natural running speech are becoming increasingly popular to investigate neural processing of speech and for applications in domains such as audiology (Vanthornhout et al, 2018; Lesenfants et al, 2019) and disorders of consciousness (Braiman et al, 2018)
The Spearman correlations between SNR and neural envelope tracking for the attention and movie condition using a 0–75 ms integration window in the decoder are respectively: 0.38 (p < 0.001) and 0.52 (p < 0.001)
For the theta band (4–8 Hz), we found a significant correlation between SNR and neural envelope tracking in both windows
Summary
EEG-based measures of neural tracking of natural running speech are becoming increasingly popular to investigate neural processing of speech and for applications in domains such as audiology (Vanthornhout et al, 2018; Lesenfants et al, 2019) and disorders of consciousness (Braiman et al, 2018). In a competing talker paradigm, it is interesting to investigate the relative level of neural speech tracking: is the attended speaker represented more strongly, the unattended one suppressed, or a combination? Kong et al (2014) measured neural tracking of a single talker in quiet, while the participant either actively listened to a stimulus or watched a movie and ignored the auditory stimulus. They found that neural tracking, measured as the peak cross-correlation between the EEG signal and stimulus envelope, was not significantly affected by the listening condition. We hypothesized that this effect would be most apparent for decoders with a temporal integration window beyond 100 ms
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