Neural dynamics of the processing of speech features: Evidence for a progression of features from acoustic to sentential processing

When we listen to speech, our brain’s neurophysiological responses “track” its acoustic features, but it is less well understood how these auditory responses are enhanced by linguistic content. We recorded magnetoencephalography (MEG) responses while subjects listened to four types of continuous-speech-like passages: speech-envelope modulated noise, English-like non-words, scrambled words, and a narrative passage. Temporal response function (TRF) analysis provides strong neural evidence for the emergent features of speech processing in cortex, from acoustics to higher-level linguistics, as incremental steps in neural speech processing. Critically, we show a stepwise hierarchical progression of progressively higher order features over time, reflected in both bottom-up (early) and top-down (late) processing stages. Linguistically driven top-down mechanisms take the form of late N400-like responses, suggesting a central role of predictive coding mechanisms at multiple levels. As expected, the neural processing of lower-level acoustic feature responses is bilateral or right lateralized, with left lateralization emerging only for lexical-semantic features. Finally, our results identify potential neural markers, linguistic level late responses, derived from TRF components modulated by linguistic content, suggesting that these markers are indicative of speech comprehension rather than mere speech perception. 

This dataset includes raw MEG (magnetoencephalography) data, behavioral responses, stimuli, predictors, main codes, some intermediate results (Temporal response functions (TRFs), features extracted from TRFs), and statistical analysis codes related to the above findings, paper titled "Neural Dynamics of the processing of speech features: Evidence for a Progression of Features from Acoustic to Sentential Processing"

Methods
Magnetoencephalography (MEG) data were recorded from young adult participants as they listened to four types of continuous-speech-like passages: speech-envelope modulated noise, English-like non-words, scrambled words, and narrative passage. All information related to experimental procedure, stimuli, preprocessing, and data anlaysis are described in the paper.