Every syllable and every phoneme in natural speech has a different duration. This variability is conventionally treated as jitter, noise the brain must overcome to recover an underlying regularity. He...

Exercise may sharpen your ability to hear speech in noisy rooms, Northeastern researchers find in a new study.

Encoding models enable measurement of how our brains represent sensory inputs using electro-and magneto-encephalography (MEEG). Evaluating how closely encoding models reflect the underlying brain func...

Speech comprehension involves the inference of abstract information from continuous acoustic signals. Prior work suggests that electrophysiological activity is synchronized with abstract linguistic structures (phrases and sentences) during the processing of isochronous syllable sequences. It is yet unclear whether this prior evidence generalizes to natural speech comprehension, which requires the flexible processing of continuous speech, where syllables and other types of linguistic units are anisochronous. Our magnetoencephalography experiment investigated neural synchronization to acoustic (syllables) and abstract units (phrases and sentences) using continuous speech ranging from artificial isochronous to more natural anisochronous. We find that neural synchronization to phrases and sentences, but not syllables, is resilient to naturalistic anisochrony. This suggests that linguistic structure processing reflects endogenous inferences that are fundamentally distinct from the exogenous processing of syllables driven by speech acoustics. Lateralization and linear regression results extend this functional dissociation as hemispheric asymmetry: stimulus-independent leftward lateralization for linguistic structure processing but stimulus-driven rightward lateralization (or bilaterality) for both syllable and acoustic processing. Our findings provide a more realistic characterization of the flexible neural mechanisms supporting the efficient comprehension of natural speech. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest.

at the BCBL- Basque Center on Cognition Brain and Language (San Sebastián, Basque Country, Spain) www.bcbl.eu The Basque Center on Cognition Brain and Language (BCBL) in San Sebastian (Basque Country,...

About the Opportunity About the Opportunity: The College of Arts, Media and Design (CAMD) at Northeastern University invites applications for a tenure-track Assistant Professor in Music, AI and Brain ...

The Medial Temporal Lobe (MTL) is key to human cognition, supporting memory, emotional processing, navigation, and semantic coding. Rare direct human MTL recordings revealed concept cells, which were ...

Successful speech communication in multi-talker scenarios requires a skilful combination of sustained attention and rapid attention switching. While the neurophysiology literature offers detailed insi...

Research in Neural Engineering, Speech and Music Perception at Trinity College Dublin

We are an international group of scientists consisting of linguists, cognitive scientists, cognitive neuroscientists, computational neuroscientists, computational modellers, computational scientists, ...