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Poster Session C: Friday, August 15, 2:00 – 5:00 pm, de Brug & E‑Hall

Integration of internal linguistic information with sensory input via weakly entrained oscillations

Rong Ding¹, Sanne ten Oever, Andrea Martin; ¹The Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics

Presenter: Rong Ding

Rhythmic neural activity has been widely observed across cognitive domains, including language. Yet, debate continues on how such activity supports speech processing: entraining to external stimuli for optimised tracking, or driving the generation of internal representations. By introducing graded sensory entrainment to a fixed oscillator model of Ten Oever and Martin (2021), our study examined how it influences phase coding—the timing-based differentiation of word nodes from internal feedback—and how these codes bias ambiguous input interpretation. Simulations show that moderate coupling supports reliable phase coding while preserving sensitivity to unexpected inputs. Our model shows how the brain could coordinate top-down linguistic representations with bottom-up sensory processes during speech processing. Reference: Ten Oever, S., & Martin, A. E. (2021). An oscillating computational model can track pseudo-rhythmic speech by using linguistic predictions. eLife, 10, e68066. https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.68066

Topic Area: Language & Communication

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