title: The pace of prosodic phrasing couples the listener's cortex to the reader's voice.
abstract: We studied online coupling between a reader's voice and a listener's cortical activity using a novel, ecologically valid continuous listening paradigm. Whole-scalp magnetoencephalographic (MEG) signals were recorded from 10 right-handed, native French-speaking listeners in four conditions: a female (Exp1f) and a male (Exp1m) reading the same text in French; a male reading a text in Finnish (Exp 2), a language incomprehensible for the subjects, and a male humming Exp1 text (Exp 3). The fundamental frequency (f0) of the reader's voice was recorded with an accelerometer attached to the throat, and coherence was computed between f0 time-course and listener's MEG. Similar levels of right-hemisphere-predominant coherence were found at ˜0.5 Hz in Exps 1-3. Dynamic imaging of coherent sources revealed that the most coherent brain regions were located in the right posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS) and posterior superior temporal gyrus (pSTG) in Exps 1-2 and in the right supratemporal auditory cortex in Exp 3. Comparison between speech rhythm and phrasing suggested a connection of the observed coherence to pauses at the sentence level both in the spoken and hummed text. These results demonstrate significant coupling at ∼0.5 Hz between reader's voice and listener's cortical signals during listening to natural continuous voice. The observed coupling suggests that voice envelope fluctuations, due to prosodic rhythmicity at the phrasal and sentence levels, are reflected in the listener's cortex as rhythmicity of about 2-s cycles. The predominance of the coherence in the right pSTS and pSTG suggests hemispherical asymmetry in processing of speech sounds at subsentence time scales.
authors.affiliation: Laboratoire de Cartographie Fonctionnelle du Cerveau, ULB-Hôpital Erasme, Université Libre de Bruxelles, 1070 Brussels, Belgium.
authors.forename: Mathieu
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Bourguignon
authors.forename: Xavier
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: De Tiège
authors.forename: Marc Op
authors.initials: MO
authors.lastname: de Beeck
authors.forename: Noémie
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Ligot
authors.forename: Philippe
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Paquier
authors.forename: Patrick
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Van Bogaert
authors.forename: Serge
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Goldman
authors.forename: Riitta
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Hari
authors.forename: Veikko
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Jousmäki
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000465:Algorithms; D001303:Auditory Cortex / Q000502:physiology*; D001307:Auditory Perception; D001696:Biomechanical Phenomena; D003627:Data Interpretation, Statistical; D005260:Female; D007839:Functional Laterality / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted; D007802:Language; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D015225:Magnetoencephalography; D008297:Male; D009146:Music; D009415:Nerve Net / Q000502:physiology; D011932:Reading; D012727:Sex Characteristics; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D013702:Temporal Lobe / Q000502:physiology; D014831:Voice; D055815:Young Adult