A listening advantage for native speech is reflected by attention-related activity in auditory cortex

• Verfasst von: Liang, Meng [VerfasserIn]
• Verfasst von: Gerwien, Johannes [VerfasserIn]
• Verfasst von: Gutschalk, Alexander [VerfasserIn]
• Titel: A listening advantage for native speech is reflected by attention-related activity in auditory cortex
• Verf.angabe: Meng Liang, Johannes Gerwien & Alexander Gutschalk
• E-Jahr: 2025
• Jahr: 05 February 2025
• Umfang: 12 S.
• Fussnoten: Gesehen am 26.03.2025
• Titel Quelle: Enthalten in: Communications biology
• Ort Quelle: London : Springer Nature, 2018
• Jahr Quelle: 2025
• Band/Heft Quelle: 8(2025), Artikel-ID 180, Seite 1-12
• ISSN Quelle: 2399-3642
• DOI: doi:10.1038/s42003-025-07601-2
• Datenträger: Online-Ressource
• Sprache: eng
• Bibliogr. Hinweis: Forschungsdaten: Liang, Meng, 1993 - : A listening advantage for native speech is reflected by attention-related activity in auditory cortex [data]
• Sach-SW: Attention
• Sach-SW: Cortex
• Sach-SW: Language
• K10plus-PPN: 1920643516

Abstract

The listening advantage for native speech is well known, but the neural basis of the effect remains unknown. Here we test the hypothesis that attentional enhancement in auditory cortex is stronger for native speech, using magnetoencephalography. Chinese and German speech stimuli were recorded by a bilingual speaker and combined into a two-stream, cocktail-party scene, with consistent and inconsistent language combinations. A group of native speakers of Chinese and a group of native speakers of German performed a detection task in the cued target stream. Results show that attention enhances negative-going activity in the temporal response function deconvoluted from the speech envelope. This activity is stronger when the target stream is in the native compared to the non-native language, and for inconsistent compared to consistent language stimuli. We interpret the findings to show that the stronger activity for native speech could be related to better top-down prediction of the native speech streams.