EEG tracks continuous speech’s amplitude envelope, but its causes remain unclear

Evidence

Recent studies have provided encouraging evidence on the capability of EEG and MEG to track neural correlates of the low-frequency amplitude envelope of continuous speech (Aiken and Picton 2008 ; Lalor and Foxe 2010 ; Ding and Simon 2012 ), a finding that has proven useful for investigating the mechanisms underlying speech processing (Luo and Poeppel 2007 ) and its dependence on attention and multisensory integration (Power et al. 2012 ; Zion Golumbic et al. 2013 ). However, the causes of this envelope-tracking phenomenon remain unclear. … In particular, phonetic-features of speech have been shown to capture information that does not emerge when using models based on the envelope, suggesting that EEG is indexing higher-level speech processing (Di Liberto et al. 2015 ). — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 4372

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the envelope-tracking phenomenon central to the chapter.