The Influence of Auditory Attention on Rhythmic Speech Tracking: Implications for Studies of Unresponsive Patients.

ABSTRACT: Language comprehension relies on integrating words into progressively more complex structures, like phrases and sentences. This hierarchical structure-building is reflected in rhythmic neural activity across multiple timescales in E/MEG in healthy, awake participants. However, recent studies have shown evidence for this "cortical tracking" of higher-level linguistic structures also in a proportion of unresponsive patients. What does this tell us about these patients' residual levels of cognition and consciousness? Must the listener direct their attention toward higher level speech structures to exhibit cortical tracking, and would selective attention across levels of the hierarchy influence the expression of these rhythms? We investigated these questions in an EEG study of 72 healthy human

SUBMITTER: Sokoliuk R 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8385206 | biostudies-literature | 2021

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature