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

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

SUBMITTER: Liang M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11799217 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature