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Poster Session B: Wednesday, August 13, 1:00 – 4:00 pm, de Brug & E‑Hall

Spatiotemporal tracking of phonetic content and probability in the human brain during continuous speech understanding

William Turner¹, Josef Parvizi¹, Laura Gwilliams¹; ¹Stanford University

Presenter: William Turner

To understand speech, the human brain integrates both the content and probability of what is being said. Whether content and probability are encoded in the same neural populations at the meso-scale, however, remains unknown. Here, we leverage the exceptional spatiotemporal precision of intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG), to track the neural encoding of phonetic features and phonetic surprisal (i.e. phoneme-level probabilities), during continuous speech processing. We identify neural populations that jointly encode phonetic information and phonetic surprisal in the superior temporal lobe. By contrast, we find that lexical surprisal (i.e. word-level probabilities) is encoded by adjacent but distinct populations. Overall, our findings have mechanistic implications for how content and probability are neurally integrated in the temporal lobe, to give rise to robust speech understanding.

Topic Area: Language & Communication

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