ArticlePLoS biology2020
Neural speech restoration at the cocktail party: Auditory cortex recovers masked speech of both attended and ignored speakers.
Article in PLoS biology, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 55 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
55 citing papers in PubMed.
- Article
- Very Early Cortical Auditory Responses to Speech in Humans.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Noise statistics drive background- and channel-specific interference in auditory midbrain representations of speech.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Enhanced Time-Locked Decoding for Spoken Words but Not Environmental Sounds in Natural-Like Auditory Conditions.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
- The spatially guided cocktail party effect shapes contralateral neural synchronization.Communications biology · 2026Article
- Neural Tracking of Sustained Attention, Attention Switching, and Natural Conversation in Audiovisual Environments Using Wearable EEG.The European journal of neuroscience · 2026Article
- Recurrent neural networks as neuro-computational models of human speech recognition.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Sensory stimuli dominate over rhythmic electrical stimulation in modulating behavior.PLoS biology · 2025Article
- Neural Speech Tracking during Selective Attention: A Spatially Realistic Audiovisual Study.eNeuro · 2025Article
- Temporal-coherence induces binding of responses to sound sequences in ferret auditory cortex.iScience · 2025Article
- Neural Dynamics of the Processing of Speech Features: Evidence for a Progression of Features from Acoustic to Sentential Processing.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Neural Bases of Proactive and Predictive Processing of Meaningful Subword Units in Speech Comprehension.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- A listening advantage for native speech is reflected by attention-related activity in auditory cortex.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Article
- Article
- Reduced Neural Distinctiveness of Speech Representations in the Middle-Aged Brain.Neurobiology of language (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Language-specific neural dynamics extend syntax into the time domain.PLoS biology · 2025Article
- Neural Dynamics of the Processing of Speech Features: Evidence for a Progression of Features from Acoustic to Sentential Processing.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Humans are remarkably skilled at listening to one speaker out of an acoustic mixture of several speech sources. Two speakers are easily segregated, even without binaural cues, but the neural mechanisms underlying this ability are not well understood. One possibility is that early cortical processing performs a spectrotemporal decomposition of the acoustic mixture, allowing the attended speech to be reconstructed via optimally weighted recombinations that discount spectrotemporal regions where sources heavily overlap. Using human magnetoencephalography (MEG) responses to a 2-talker mixture, we show evidence for an alternative possibility, in which early, active segregation occurs even for strongly spectrotemporally overlapping regions. Early (approximately 70-millisecond) responses to nonoverlapping spectrotemporal features are seen for both talkers. When competing talkers' spectrotemporal features mask each other, the individual representations persist, but they occur with an approximately 20-millisecond delay. This suggests that the auditory cortex recovers acoustic features that are masked in the mixture, even if they occurred in the ignored speech. The existence of such noise-robust cortical representations, of features present in attended as well as ignored speech, suggests an active cortical stream segregation process, which could explain a range of behavioral effects of ignored background 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.