ArticleThe Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience2019
Semantic Context Enhances the Early Auditory Encoding of Natural Speech.
Article in The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 63 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
63 citing papers in PubMed, 159 citations in OpenAlex.
- Dissociable electrophysiological measures of natural language processing reveal differences in speech comprehension strategy in healthy ageing.Scientific reports · 2021Trial
- Neural tracking of surprisal and semantic distance in naturalistic movie viewing.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Article
- Quantifying the Influence of Lexical Surprisal on Acoustic Speech Encoding While Controlling for Within-Speaker Variability.The European journal of neuroscience · 2026Article
- Competing speech streams are simultaneously represented in the human cortex during attention switching.PLoS biology · 2026Article
- Speech Neurophysiology in Realistic Contexts: Big Hype or Big Leap?The European journal of neuroscience · 2026Review
- Measuring naturalistic speech comprehension in real time.Behavior research methods · 2026Article
- The representation of speech conversations in the human auditory cortex: role of social and semantic factors.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2026Article
- Smart home soundscape: constructing a perceptual model with qualitative and quantitative methods.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Sensory sharpening and semantic prediction errors unify competing models of predictive processing in human speech comprehension.PLoS biology · 2026Article
- Dynamic modeling of EEG responses to natural speech reveals earlier processing of predictable words.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Temporal patterns in the complexity of child-directed song lyrics reflect their functions.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- A listening advantage for native speech is reflected by attention-related activity in auditory cortex.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Article
- A functional systems view on neural tracking of natural speech.Frontiers in systems neuroscience · 2025Article
- Timecourse of bottom-up and top-down language processing during a picture-based semantic priming task.Language, cognition and neuroscience · 2025Article
- Convergent neural signatures of speech prediction error are a biological marker for spoken word recognition.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Deep-learning models reveal how context and listener attention shape electrophysiological correlates of speech-to-language transformation.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- Speaker-listener neural coupling correlates with semantic and acoustic features of naturalistic speech.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2024Article
- Article
3 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors at 3 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Speech perception involves the integration of sensory input with expectations based on the context of that speech. Much debate surrounds the issue of whether or not prior knowledge feeds back to affect early auditory encoding in the lower levels of the speech processing hierarchy, or whether perception can be best explained as a purely feedforward process. Although there has been compelling evidence on both sides of this debate, experiments involving naturalistic speech stimuli to address these questions have been lacking. Here, we use a recently introduced method for quantifying the semantic context of speech and relate it to a commonly used method for indexing low-level auditory encoding of speech. The relationship between these measures is taken to be an indication of how semantic context leading up to a word influences how its low-level acoustic and phonetic features are processed. We record EEG from human participants (both male and female) listening to continuous natural speech and find that the early cortical tracking of a word's speech envelope is enhanced by its semantic similarity to its sentential context. Using a forward modeling approach, we find that prediction accuracy of the EEG signal also shows the same effect. Furthermore, this effect shows distinct temporal patterns of correlation depending on the type of speech input representation (acoustic or phonological) used for the model, implicating a top-down propagation of information through the processing hierarchy. These results suggest a mechanism that links top-down prior information with the early cortical entrainment of words in natural, continuous speech.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.