Characterizing Neural Entrainment to Hierarchical Linguistic Units using Electroencephalography (EEG)

• Published in: Frontiers in human neuroscience Vol. 11; p. 481
• Main Authors: Ding, Nai, Melloni, Lucia, Yang, Aotian, Wang, Yu, Zhang, Wen, Poeppel, David
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland Frontiers Research Foundation 28.09.2017; Frontiers Media S.A
• Subjects: Acoustics; Biomedical engineering; Cortex; EEG; Electroencephalography; Entrainment; hierarchical structures; Laboratories; Linguistics; Magnetoencephalography; Neural coding; Neuroscience; Neurosciences; phrase; speech; Studies; New York; United States > US; China; Germany; hierarchical structures; phrase; speech; EEG; entrainment
• ISSN: 1662-5161; 1662-5161
• DOI: 10.3389/fnhum.2017.00481

To understand speech, listeners have to combine the words they hear into phrases and sentences. Recent magnetoencephalography (MEG) and electrocorticography (ECoG) studies show that cortical activity is concurrently entrained/synchronized to the rhythms of multiple levels of linguistic units including words, phrases, and sentences. Here we investigate whether this phenomenon can be observed using electroencephalography (EEG), a technique that is more widely available than MEG and ECoG. We show that the EEG responses concurrently track the rhythms of hierarchical linguistic units such as syllables/words, phrases, and sentences. The strength of the sentential-rate response correlates with how well each subject can detect random words embedded in a sequence of sentences. In contrast, only a syllabic-rate response is observed for an unintelligible control stimulus. In sum, EEG provides a useful tool to characterize neural encoding of hierarchical linguistic units, potentially even in individual participants.