Presentation
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Title: Does rhythmic movement improve neural tracking of linguistic features, thereby facilitating speech perception?
Poster C77 in Poster Session C, Wednesday, October 25, 10:15 am - 12:00 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
This poster is part of the Sandbox Series.
laure deyna1, Noémie te Rietmolen2, Sophie Chen1, Benjamin Morillon1; 1Aix Marseille Université, INSERM, INS, Institut de Neurosciences des Systèmes, Marseille, France, 2Max Plank Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
Listening to speech activates cortical regions of the sensorimotor system, but their functional role in speech processing is strongly debated. The temporal attending theory proposed that the motor system is involved in predictive timing, aligning fluctuations of attention to rhythmic cues in the auditory stream. Behaviorally, it has been shown that temporal processing of an auditory stream is improved when participants produce overt rhythmic movements compared to when they are staying still. In this work, we wondered if the motor system is implicated in processing linguistic rhythms during speech perception, such as the phrasal, syllabic or lexical rates. Our objective is to investigate whether activating the motor cortex through rhythmic movements can enhance the tracking of some linguistic timescales and facilitate speech comprehension in challenging listening conditions. In a first experiment, participants performed a behavioral task consisting of understanding sentences embedded in noise. Each sentence was preceded by a priming phase in which participants rhythmically tapped with their index finger. Tapping at a tempo of 1, 2, and 4 Hz was tested, and the results revealed that tapping at 2 Hz before hearing a sentence significantly improved its comprehension. This finding suggests that spontaneous rhythmic movements (which naturally occur at 2 Hz) enhance the tracking of the lexical rhythm (2 Hz), potentially facilitating lexical segmentation. To investigate this hypothesis, we replicated this study on 10 participants using EEG recordings, focusing solely on 2 Hz tapping. We aim to explore how motor priming affects the subsequent neural encoding of different speech features. Our hypothesis posits that the lexical rate (2 Hz) should be better neurally encoded, indicating that the motor system contributes to the processing of this linguistic rhythm. Moreover, we will also investigate whether this contribution extends to some other linguistic timescales. Overall, this work shows that the use of an overt motor strategy can facilitate speech perception in challenging listening conditions, and proposes that motor areas contribute to the processing of the temporal dynamics of speech.
Topic Areas: Speech Perception, Multisensory or Sensorimotor Integration