Maaike Smit – Neural tracking of speech in Adults and Children

** This ELiTU talk will take place on a Tuesday from 15:30-16:30. **

co-authors: Ana B. Carbajal Cahvez; Marlies Gillis; Maaike Vandermosten; Pol Ghesquière; Jan Wouters

Abstract:

Dyslexia is typically diagnosed only after children fail to meet early literacy milestones, even though interventions are most effective before formal reading instruction (Ozernov-Palchik & Gaab, 2016). This shows the need for early (neural) markers of dyslexia that can be identified prior to literacy onset.

In my work, I study neural tracking, or the phenomenon where the brain activity follows the temporal dynamics of continuous speech. This approach provides a sensitive measure of both acoustic and linguistic processing during natural speech perception (Brodbeck et al., 2018).

First, in adults, we investigated how different types of background noise influence neural tracking during story listening. Participants listened to spoken stories while EEG was recorded, and acoustic processing was assessed with neural tracking of the speech envelope.

The main focus of my PhD is early speech processing in children with and without a familial risk for dyslexia. We adopted a longitudinal design and have now at T1 tested three- and five-year-old children using a comparable EEG story-listening paradigm. Acoustic processing was again studied by neural tracking of the speech envelope. Higher-order linguistic processing was assessed using neural responses to ‘linguistic features’, such as phoneme-surprisal (Gillis et al., 2021).

Key references

Brodbeck, C., Hong, L. E., & Simon, J. Z. (2018). Rapid Transformation from Auditory to Linguistic Representations of Continuous Speech. Current Biology, 28(24), 3976-3983.e5. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2018.10.042

Gillis, M., Vanthornhout, J., Simon, J. Z., Francart, T., & Brodbeck, C. (2021). Neural Markers of Speech Comprehension: Measuring EEG Tracking of Linguistic Speech Representations, Controlling the Speech Acoustics. Journal of Neuroscience, 41(50), 10316–10329. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0812-21.2021

Ozernov-Palchik, O., & Gaab, N. (2016). Tackling the ‘dyslexia paradox’: Reading brain and behavior for early markers of developmental dyslexiax. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, 7(2), 156–176. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcs.1383

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