Ongoing slow oscillatory phase modulates speech intelligibility in cooperation with motor cortical activity

PLoS One. 2017 Aug 11;12(8):e0183146. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0183146. eCollection 2017.

Abstract

Neural oscillation is attracting attention as an underlying mechanism for speech recognition. Speech intelligibility is enhanced by the synchronization of speech rhythms and slow neural oscillation, which is typically observed as human scalp electroencephalography (EEG). In addition to the effect of neural oscillation, it has been proposed that speech recognition is enhanced by the identification of a speaker's motor signals, which are used for speech production. To verify the relationship between the effect of neural oscillation and motor cortical activity, we measured scalp EEG, and simultaneous EEG and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) during a speech recognition task in which participants were required to recognize spoken words embedded in noise sound. We proposed an index to quantitatively evaluate the EEG phase effect on behavioral performance. The results showed that the delta and theta EEG phase before speech inputs modulated the participant's response time when conducting speech recognition tasks. The simultaneous EEG-fMRI experiment showed that slow EEG activity was correlated with motor cortical activity. These results suggested that the effect of the slow oscillatory phase was associated with the activity of the motor cortex during speech recognition.

MeSH terms

  • Adult
  • Brain Mapping
  • Electroencephalography
  • Female
  • Humans
  • Magnetic Resonance Imaging
  • Male
  • Motor Cortex / anatomy & histology
  • Motor Cortex / physiology*
  • Speech Acoustics
  • Speech Intelligibility / physiology*
  • Speech Perception / physiology*

Grants and funding

TO was supported by Japan Society for the Promotion of Science KAKENHI Grant Number 15J07444. HM and KK were supported by Japan Society for the Promotion of Science KAKENHI Grant Number 25240019. HM was supported by Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology KAKENHI Grant Numbers 21120008, 16H01610. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.