Abstract
Understanding speech while ignoring competing speech streams in the surrounding environ-3 ment is challenging. Previous studies have demonstrated that attention shapes the neural4 representation of speech features. Attended streams are typically represented more strongly5 than unattended ones, suggesting either enhancement of the attended or suppression of6 the unattended stream. However, it is unclear how these complementary processes support7 attentional filtering and speech comprehension on different hierarchical levels. In this study,8 we used multivariate temporal response functions to analyze the EEG signals of 43 young9 adults, examining the relationship between the neural tracking of acoustic and higher-level10 linguistic features and a fine-grained speech comprehension measure. We show that the neu-11 ral tracking of word and phoneme onsets and word-level linguistic features in the attended12 stream predicted comprehension at the individual single-trial level. Moreover, acoustic track-13 ing of the ignored speech stream was positively correlated with comprehension performance,14 whereas word level linguistic neural tracking of the ignored stream was negatively correlated15 with comprehension. Collectively, our results suggest that attentional filtering during speech16 comprehension requires target enhancement as well as distractor suppression at different17 hierarchical levels.
Authors
Barchet, A. V., Bruera, A., Wend, J., Rimmele, J. M., Obleser, J., & Hartwigsen, G.
https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0657-25.2025