Presentation
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Comprehension and neuronal tracking of speeded speech - contributions of preferred rates and auditory-motor synchronization
Poster E83 in Poster Session E, Thursday, October 26, 10:15 am - 12:00 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
This poster is part of the Sandbox Series.
Christina Lubinus1, Anne Keitel2, Jonas Obleser3, David Poeppel4, Johanna Rimmele1; 1Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, 2University of Dundee, 3University of Lübeck, 4Ernst Strüngmann Institute for Neuroscience
Acoustic speech signals are tracked along the auditory pathway, presumably facilitating speech segmentation and decoding of speech information. Humans listeners understand speech effortlessly within an optimal range of syllabic rates, however, comprehension deteriorates at fast speech rates. Thus, speech comprehension is suggested to be limited by the temporal constraints of the auditory system. Here we ask whether these temporal constraints are shaped by individual differences in temporal characteristics of the auditory and motor systems, and the auditory-motor coupling strength. In a combined behavioral and MEG experiment, we characterize individual differences in the comprehension of naturalistic speech as a function of the synchronization between the auditory and motor systems and the preferred frequencies of the systems. Furthermore, we investigate how different levels in the auditory processing hierarchy are affected by accelerated speech. More specifically, do increased speech rates lead to poorer early auditory speech tracking and/or are higher-level representations of linguistic information impaired? In the behavioral data we observed that speech comprehension declined at higher speech rates. Importantly, both auditory-motor synchronization and spontaneous speech motor production rates were predictive of better speech-comprehension performance, with higher synchronization and rates related to better performance. Furthermore, performance increased with higher working memory capacity (Digit Span). The MEG data analysis is ongoing, however, we expect that as the syllabic rate increases, both speech tracking in auditory cortex and the amplitude of the TRF400 (indicating linguistic representation) decrease. The behavioral data provide evidence for a model of speech comprehension in which individual flexibility of the motor system and auditory-motor synchronization may play a modulatory role.
Topic Areas: Speech Perception, Speech Motor Control