Issue Archive

The neural encoding of continuous speech – recent advances in EEG and MEG studies

PAN Xun-Yi¹, ZOU Jia-Jie², JIN Pei-Qing², DING Nai^2,*

¹School of International Studies, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, China；²Biomedical Engineering and Instrument Sciences, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, China

Abstract

Speech comprehension is a central cognitive function of the human brain. In cognitive neuroscience, a fundamental question is to understand how neural activity encodes the acoustic properties of a continuous speech stream and resolves multiple levels of linguistic structures at the same time. This paper reviews the recently developed research paradigms that employ electroencephalography (EEG) or magnetoencephalography (MEG) to capture neural tracking of acoustic features or linguistic structures of continuous speech. This review focuses on two questions in speech processing: (1) The encoding of continuously changing acoustic properties of speech; (2) The representation of hierarchical linguistic units, including syllables, words, phrases and sentences. Studies have found that the low-frequency cortical activity tracks the speech envelope. In addition, the cortical activities on different time scales track multiple levels of linguistic units and constitute a representation of hierarchically organized linguistic units. The article reviewed these studies, which provided new insights into the processes of continuous speech in the human brain.

Key words: speech; language; neural activity; envelope tracking response; concurrent hierarchical tracking

Received: 2019-04-08　　Accepted: 2019-08-15

Corresponding author: 丁鼐　　E-mail: ding_nai@zju.edu.cn

DOI: 10.13294/j.aps.2019.0060

Citing This Article：

PAN Xun-Yi, ZOU Jia-Jie, JIN Pei-Qing, DING Nai. The neural encoding of continuous speech – recent advances in EEG and MEG studies. Acta Physiol Sin 2019; 71 (6): 935-945 (in Chinese with English abstract).