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Linguistic processing of task-irrelevant speech at a cocktail party

eLife, ISSN: 2050-084X, Vol: 10
2021
  • 33
    Citations
  • 0
    Usage
  • 61
    Captures
  • 1
    Mentions
  • 21
    Social Media
Metric Options:   Counts1 Year3 Year

Metrics Details

  • Citations
    33
  • Captures
    61
  • Mentions
    1
    • News Mentions
      1
      • 1
  • Social Media
    21
    • Shares, Likes & Comments
      21
      • Facebook
        21

Most Recent News

Researchers move one step closer to understanding how the brain processes multiple conversations at once

Conducting a discussion in a noisy place can be challenging when other conversations and background noises interfere with our ability to focus attention on our conversation partner. How the brain deals with the abundance of sounds in our environments, and prioritizes among them, has been a topic of debate among cognitive neuroscientists for many decades.

Article Description

Paying attention to one speaker in a noisy place can be extremely difficult, because tobe- attended and task-irrelevant speech compete for processing resources. We tested whether this competition is restricted to acoustic-phonetic interference or if it extends to competition for linguistic processing as well. Neural activity was recorded using Magnetoencephalography as human participants were instructed to attend to natural speech presented to one ear, and taskirrelevant stimuli were presented to the other. Task-irrelevant stimuli consisted either of random sequences of syllables, or syllables structured to form coherent sentences, using hierarchical frequency-tagging. We find that the phrasal structure of structured task-irrelevant stimuli was represented in the neural response in left inferior frontal and posterior parietal regions, indicating that selective attention does not fully eliminate linguistic processing of task-irrelevant speech. Additionally, neural tracking of to-be-attended speech in left inferior frontal regions was enhanced when competing with structured task-irrelevant stimuli, suggesting inherent competition between them for linguistic processing.

Bibliographic Details

Har-Shai Yahav, Paz; Zion Golumbic, Elana

eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd

Neuroscience; Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology; Immunology and Microbiology

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