Data from: Neural tracking of syllabic and phonemic time scale

Dynamical theories of speech processing propose that the auditory cortex
parses acoustic information in parallel at the syllabic and phonemic time
scales. A paradigm was developed to independently manipulate both
linguistic time scales, and intracranial recordings were acquired from
eleven epileptic patients listening to French sentences. Our results
indicate that (i) syllabic and phonemic time scales are both reflected in
the acoustic spectral flux; (ii) during comprehension, the auditory cortex
tracks the syllabic time scale in the theta range, while neural activity
in the alpha-beta range phase locks to the phonemic time scale; (iii)
these neural dynamics occur simultaneously and share a joint spatial
location; (iv) the spectral flux embeds two time scales —in the theta and
low-beta ranges— across 17 natural languages. These findings help
understand how the human brain extracts acoustic information from the
continuous speech signal at multiple time scales simultaneously, a
prerequisite for subsequent linguistic processing.