Dr Nai Ding | Neural encoding of connected speech: from syllables to phrases

During speech comprehension, the acoustic features of speech are mapped onto

hierarchically organized linguistic units, including, e.g., syllables, words, and phrases. Here, I

will present our recent studies on (1) the acoustic correlate of syllables and (2) rule-based

encoding of phrases. I first will revisit the link between syllables and the acoustic speech

envelope. Analyses based on large corpora confirm reliable phase locking between syllable

onsets and speech envelope. Nevertheless, in the frequency domain, the mapping between

the speech modulation spectrum and syllable rate is highly complex. Second, I will present our

recent studies on neural encoding of “phrases” that are defined by artificial rules learned

within an experiment, and compare the neural encoding of such artificial phrases and

syntactically defined phrases. Finally, I will summarize some technique concerns on the

analysis of neural encoding of speech units.

Poster