Neurocortical mechanisms of comprehension in degraded speech
Jonas Obleser, Antje Strauß, Anna Wilsch · Proceedings of the International Symposium on Auditory and Audiological Research · 2011
Comprehending speech is an astonishing faculty of the human brain, especially so under adverse listening conditions. How and by which neural mechanisms do we cope so well with the fleeting percepts of speech? In addition to “facilitating” influences such as semantic context, listeners also cope with challenging listening situation by fully exploiting their sensory and cognitive resources, e.g. their working memory capacities (“compensation”). We will propose a framework for studying neural signatures of facilitation and compensation, and discuss recent data from functional MRI (fMRI), magneto- and electroencephalography studies (M/EEG; with an emphasis on neural oscillations) that utilize acoustically degraded speech stimuli to study the neural underpinnings of these facilitation and compensation mechanisms in detail.