Continuous speech with pauses inserted between words increases cortical tracking of speech envelope
Continuous speech with pauses inserted between words increases cortical tracking of speech envelope
The decoding multivariate Temporal Response Function (decoder) or speech envelope reconstruction approach is a well-known tool for assessing the cortical tracking of speech envelope. It is used to analyse the correlation between the speech stimulus and the neural response. It is known that auditory late responses are enhanced with longer gaps between stimuli, but it is not clear if this applies to the decoder, and whether the addition of gaps/ pauses in continuous speech could be used to increase the envelope reconstruction accuracy. We investigated this in normal hearing participants who listened to continuous speech with no added pauses (natural speech), and then with short (250 ms) or long (500 ms) silent pauses inserted between each word. The total duration for continuous speech stimulus with no, short, and long pauses were approximately, 10 minutes, 16 minutes, and 21 minutes, respectively. EEG and speech envelope were simultaneously acquired and then filtered into delta (1–4 Hz) and theta (4–8 Hz) frequency bands. In addition to analysing responses to the whole speech envelope, speech envelope was also segmented to focus response analysis on onset and non-onset regions of speech separately. Our results show that continuous speech with additional pauses inserted between words significantly increases the speech envelope reconstruction correlations compared to using natural speech, in both the delta and theta frequency bands. It also appears that these increase in speech envelope reconstruction are dominated by the onset regions in the speech envelope. Introducing pauses in speech stimuli has potential clinical benefit for increasing auditory evoked response detectability, though with the disadvantage of speech sounding less natural. The strong effect of pauses and onsets on the decoder should be considered when comparing results from different speech corpora. Whether the increased cortical response, when longer pauses are introduced, reflect improved intelligibility requires further investigation.
Deoisres, Suwijak
e454d5e5-c7c3-4027-bf4e-203c65a4e6cf
Lu, Yuhan
db61af48-65ce-40c1-8864-877a5b9252c0
Vanheusden, Frederique J.
c3022456-907d-4dfa-b537-b3fbc119d76b
Bell, Steven L.
91de0801-d2b7-44ba-8e8e-523e672aed8a
Simpson, David M.
53674880-f381-4cc9-8505-6a97eeac3c2a
27 July 2023
Deoisres, Suwijak
e454d5e5-c7c3-4027-bf4e-203c65a4e6cf
Lu, Yuhan
db61af48-65ce-40c1-8864-877a5b9252c0
Vanheusden, Frederique J.
c3022456-907d-4dfa-b537-b3fbc119d76b
Bell, Steven L.
91de0801-d2b7-44ba-8e8e-523e672aed8a
Simpson, David M.
53674880-f381-4cc9-8505-6a97eeac3c2a
Deoisres, Suwijak, Lu, Yuhan, Vanheusden, Frederique J., Bell, Steven L. and Simpson, David M.
(2023)
Continuous speech with pauses inserted between words increases cortical tracking of speech envelope.
PLoS ONE, 18 (7 July), [e0289288].
(doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0289288).
Abstract
The decoding multivariate Temporal Response Function (decoder) or speech envelope reconstruction approach is a well-known tool for assessing the cortical tracking of speech envelope. It is used to analyse the correlation between the speech stimulus and the neural response. It is known that auditory late responses are enhanced with longer gaps between stimuli, but it is not clear if this applies to the decoder, and whether the addition of gaps/ pauses in continuous speech could be used to increase the envelope reconstruction accuracy. We investigated this in normal hearing participants who listened to continuous speech with no added pauses (natural speech), and then with short (250 ms) or long (500 ms) silent pauses inserted between each word. The total duration for continuous speech stimulus with no, short, and long pauses were approximately, 10 minutes, 16 minutes, and 21 minutes, respectively. EEG and speech envelope were simultaneously acquired and then filtered into delta (1–4 Hz) and theta (4–8 Hz) frequency bands. In addition to analysing responses to the whole speech envelope, speech envelope was also segmented to focus response analysis on onset and non-onset regions of speech separately. Our results show that continuous speech with additional pauses inserted between words significantly increases the speech envelope reconstruction correlations compared to using natural speech, in both the delta and theta frequency bands. It also appears that these increase in speech envelope reconstruction are dominated by the onset regions in the speech envelope. Introducing pauses in speech stimuli has potential clinical benefit for increasing auditory evoked response detectability, though with the disadvantage of speech sounding less natural. The strong effect of pauses and onsets on the decoder should be considered when comparing results from different speech corpora. Whether the increased cortical response, when longer pauses are introduced, reflect improved intelligibility requires further investigation.
Text
Continuous Speech with Pauses - Accepted - NoLineNumbers
- Accepted Manuscript
Text
journal.pone.0289288
- Version of Record
More information
Accepted/In Press date: 17 July 2023
e-pub ahead of print date: 27 July 2023
Published date: 27 July 2023
Additional Information:
Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 Deoisres et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Copyright: © 2023 Deoisres et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Identifiers
Local EPrints ID: 480575
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/480575
ISSN: 1932-6203
PURE UUID: 7ab44400-fd9d-4091-ac23-f2111a1b78f7
Catalogue record
Date deposited: 04 Aug 2023 16:54
Last modified: 18 Mar 2024 02:56
Export record
Altmetrics
Contributors
Author:
Suwijak Deoisres
Author:
Yuhan Lu
Author:
Frederique J. Vanheusden
Download statistics
Downloads from ePrints over the past year. Other digital versions may also be available to download e.g. from the publisher's website.
View more statistics