Syllable-initial phonemes affect neural entrainment to consonant-vowel syllables

Oana Cucu, Conor Houghton and Nina Kazanina

ABSTRACT

Neural entrainment to speech seems to rely on syllabic features, especially those pertaining to the acoustic envelope of the stimuli. So far it has not been shown whether neural phase locking to those features also depends on their phonemic content. To investigate this, we measured neural entrainment to near-isochronous stimuli comprising syllables beginning with different phonemes. We found that entrainment was different across different classes and sub-classes of the syllable-initial phoneme, and also, that this depended on the amount of “edge” in the sound 10 envelope. In particular, the best edge marker and predictor of entrainment was the latency to the 11 peak derivative of each syllable.

Note

The raw EEG data as well as larger Matlab variables used in some of the scripts are uploaded publicly to https://osf.io/3c6tv/.