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

Neural encoding of lexical stress in human speech cortex

Ilina Bhaya-Grossman¹, Yulia Oganian², Emily Grabowski³, Edward Chang⁴; ¹University of California, San Francisco, ²Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen, ³University of California, Berkeley, ⁴University of California-San Francisco

Presenter: Ilina Bhaya-Grossman

Lexical stress – what distinguishes the noun “PRE-sent” from the verb “pre-SENT” – critically facilitates word recognition and comprehension in speech perception. To understand the neural mechanisms that enable the perception of lexical stress, we collected high-density intracranial electrocorticography recordings (ECoG) while ten English speaking participants performed two experiments: 1) passively listening to sentences with natural stress patterns and 2) actively identifying the stressed syllables in isolated spoken words. In Experiment 1, we identified neural populations that significantly encoded whether a syllable was stressed in natural speech. In Experiment 2, we found that stress-encoding neural populations were both sensitive to prior syllable contexts and categorical. Our findings characterize the distinct neural populations that process lexical stress, providing insight into the complex neural mechanisms that underlie this fundamental linguistic skill.

Topic Area: Language & Communication

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