Phase-Locked Responses to Speech in Human Auditory Cortex are Enhanced

During Comprehension
Jonathan E. Peelle
1,4
, Joachim Gross
2,3
and Matthew H. Davis
1
1
MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Cambridge CB2 7EF, UK and
2
School of Psychology and
3
Centre for Cognitive
Neuroimaging (CCNi), University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8QB, UK
4
Present address: Center for Cognitive Neuroscience and Department of Neurology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA
19104, USA
Address correspondence to Dr Matthew H. Davis, Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Medical Research Council, 15 Chaucer Road, Cambridge
CB2 7EF, UK. Email: [email protected].
A growing body of evidence shows that ongoing oscillations in
auditory cortex modulate their phase to match the rhythm of tempo-
rally regular acoustic stimuli, increasing sensitivity to relevant envi-
ronmental cues and improving detection accuracy. In the current
study, we test the hypothesis that nonsensory information provided
by linguistic content enhances phase-locked responses to intelligible
speech in the human brain. Sixteen adults listened to meaningful sen-
tences while we recorded neural activity using magnetoencephalogra-
phy. Stimuli were processed using a noise-vocoding technique to vary
intelligibility while keeping the temporal acoustic envelope consistent.
We show that the acoustic envelopes of sentences contain most
power between 4 and 7 Hz and that it is in this frequency band that
phase locking between neural activity and envelopes is strongest.
Bilateral oscillatory neural activity phase-locked to unintelligible
speech, but this cerebro-acoustic phase locking was enhanced
when speech was intelligible. This enhanced phase locking was
left lateralized and localized to left temporal cortex. Together, our
results demonstrate that entrainment to connected speech does not
only depend on acoustic characteristics, but is also affected by lis-
teners ability to extract linguistic information. This suggests a bio-
logical framework for speech comprehension in which acoustic and
linguistic cues reciprocally aid in stimulus prediction.
Keywords: entrainment, intelligibility, prediction, rhythm, speech
comprehension, MEG
Introduction
Oscillatory neural activity is ubiquitous, reecting the shifting
excitability of ensembles of neurons over time (Bishop 1932;
Buzski and Draguhn 2004). An elegant and growing body of
work has demonstrated that oscillations in auditory cortex
entrain (phase-lock) to temporally-regular acoustic cues
(Lakatos et al. 2005) and that these phase-locked responses
are enhanced in the presence of congruent information in
other sensory modalities (Lakatos et al. 2007). Synchronizing
oscillatory activity with environmental cues provides a mech-
anism to increase sensitivity to relevant information, and thus
aids in the efciency of sensory processing (Lakatos et al.
2008; Schroeder et al. 2010). The integration of information
across sensory modalities supports this process when multi-
sensory cues are temporally correlated, as often happens with
natural stimuli. In human speech comprehension, linguistic
cues (e.g. syllables and words) occur in quasi-regular ordered
sequences that parallel acoustic information. In the current
study, we therefore test the hypothesis that nonsensory
information provided by linguistic content would enhance
phase-locked responses to intelligible speech in human audi-
tory cortex.
Spoken language is inherently temporal (Kotz and
Schwartze 2010), and replete with low-frequency acoustic
information. Acoustic and kinematic analyses of speech
signals show that a dominant component of connected
speech is found in slow amplitude modulations (approxi-
mately 47 Hz) that result from the rhythmic opening and
closing of the jaw (MacNeilage 1998; Chandrasekaran et al.
2009), and which are associated with metrical stress and sylla-
ble structure in English (Cummins and Port 1998). This low-
frequency envelope information helps to convey a number of
important segmental and prosodic cues (Rosen 1992). Sensi-
tivity to speech ratewhich varies considerably both within
and between talkers (Miller, Grosjean et al. 1984)is also
necessary to effectively interpret speech sounds, many of
which show rate dependence (Miller, Aibel et al. 1984). It is
not surprising, therefore, that accurate processing of low-
frequency acoustic information plays a critical role in under-
standing speech (Drullman et al. 1994; Greenberg et al. 2003;
Elliott and Theunissen 2009). However, the mechanisms by
which the human auditory system accomplishes this are still
unclear.
One promising explanation is that oscillations in human
auditory and/or periauditory cortex entrain to speech rhythm.
This hypothesis has received considerable support from pre-
vious human electrophysiological studies (Ahissar et al. 2001;
Luo and Poeppel 2007; Kerlin et al. 2010; Lalor and Foxe
2010). Such phase locking of ongoing activity in auditory pro-
cessing regions to acoustic information would increase listen-
ers sensitivity to relevant acoustic cues and aid in the
efciency of spoken language processing. A similar relation-
ship between rhythmic acoustic information and oscillatory
neural activity is also found in studies of nonhuman primates
(Lakatos et al. 2005, 2007), and thus appears to be an evolu-
tionarily conserved mechanism of sensory processing and at-
tentional selection. What remains unclear is whether these
phase-locked responses can be modulated by nonsensory
informationin the case of speech comprehension, by the
linguistic content available in the speech signal.
In the current study we investigate phase-locked cortical
responses to slow amplitude modulations in trial-unique speech
samples using magnetoencephalography (MEG). We focus on
whether the phase locking of cortical responses benets from
linguistic information, or is solely a response to acoustic infor-
mation in connected speech. We also use source localization
The Authors 2012. Published by Oxford University Press.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.5), which
permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Cerebral Cortex June 2013;23:13781387
doi:10.1093/cercor/bhs118
Advance Access publication May 17, 2012

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methods to address outstanding questions concerning the
lateralization and neural source of these phase-locked
responses. To separate linguistic and acoustic processes we
use a noise-vocoding manipulation that progressively reduces
the spectral detail present in the speech signal but faithfully
preserves the slow amplitude uctuations responsible for
speech rhythm (Shannon et al. 1995). The intelligibility of
noise-vocoded speech varies systematically with the amount
of spectral detail present (i.e. the number of frequency chan-
nels used in the vocoding) and can thus be adjusted to
achieve markedly different levels of intelligibility (Fig. 1A).
Here, we test fully intelligible speech (16 channel), moder-
ately intelligible speech (4 channel), and 2 unintelligible
control conditions (4 channel rotated and 1 channel). Criti-
cally, the overall amplitude envelopeand hence the primary
acoustic signature of speech rhythmis preserved under all
conditions, even in vocoded speech that is entirely unintelligi-
ble (Fig. 1B). Thus, if neural responses depend solely on
rhythmic acoustic cues, they should not differ across intellig-
ibility conditions. However, if oscillatory activity benets from
linguistic information, phase-locked cortical activity should be
enhanced when speech is intelligible.
Materials and Methods
Participants
Participants were 16 healthy right-handed native speakers of British
English (aged 1935 years, 8 female) with normal hearing and no
history of neurological, psychiatric, or developmental disorders. All
gave written informed consent under a process approved by the Cam-
bridge Psychology Research Ethics Committee.
Figure 1. Stimulus characteristics. (A) Spectrograms of a single example sentence in the 4 speech conditions, with the amplitude envelope for each frequency band overlaid.
Spectral change for the 16 channel sentence is absent from the 1 channel sentence. This spectral change is created by differences between the amplitude envelopes in
multichannel vocoded speech. (B) Despite differences in spectral detail, the overall amplitude envelope contains only minor differences among the 4 conditions. (C) The
modulation power spectrum of sentences in each condition shows 1/f noise as expected. Shading indicates 47 Hz where speech signals are expected to have increased power.
(D) Residual modulation power spectra for each of the 4 speech conditions: after 1/f noise is subtracted highlights the peak in modulatory power between 4 and 7 Hz. (E) Word
report accuracy for sentences presented in each of the 4 speech conditions. Error bars here and elsewhere reect standard error of the mean with between-subject variability
removed (Loftus and Masson 1994).
Cerebral Cortex June 2013, V 23 N 6 1379

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Materials
We used 200 meaningful sentences ranging in length from 5 to 17
words (M= 10.9, SD= 2.2) and in duration from 2.31 to 4.52 s
(M= 2.96, SD= 0.45) taken from previous experiments (Davis and
Johnsrude 2003; Rodd et al. 2005). All were recorded by a male native
speaker of British English and digitized at 22 050 Hz. For each partici-
pant, each sentence occurred once in an intelligible condition (16 or
4 channel) and once in an unintelligible condition (4 channel rotated
or 1 channel).
Noise vocoding was performed using custom Matlab scripts. The fre-
quency range of 508000 Hz was divided into 1, 4, or 16 logarithmi-
cally spaced channels. For each channel, the amplitude envelope was
extracted by full-wave rectifying the signal and applying a lowpass
lter with a cutoff of 30 Hz. This envelope was then used to amplitude
modulate white noise, which was ltered again before recombining the
channels. In the case of the 1, 4, and 16 channel conditions, the output
channel frequencies matched the input channel frequencies. In the
case of 4 channel rotated speech, the output frequencies were inverted,
effectively spectrally rotating the speech information (Scott et al. 2000).
Because the selected number of vocoding channels followed a geo-
metric progression, the frequency boundaries were common across
conditions, and the corresponding envelopes were nearly equivalent
(i.e. the sum of the lowest 4 channels in the 16 channel condition was
equivalent to the lowest channel in the 4 channel condition) with
only negligible differences due to ltering. Both the 1 channel and 4
channel rotated conditions are unintelligible but, because of their pre-
served rhythmic properties (and the experimental context), were likely
perceived as speech or speech-like by listeners.
We focused our analysis on the low-frequency information in the
speech signal based on prior studies and the knowledge that envel-
ope information is critically important for comprehension of vocoded
speech (Drullman et al. 1994; Shannon et al. 1995). We extracted the
amplitude envelope for each stimulus, using full wave rectication
and a lowpass lter at 30 Hz for use in the coherence analysis
(Fig. 1B). This envelope served as the acoustic signal for all phase-
locking analyses.
Procedure
Prior to the experiment, participants heard several example sentences
in each condition, and were instructed to repeat back as many words
as possible from each. They were informed that some sentences would
be unintelligible and instructed that if they could not guess any of the
words presented they should say pass. This word report task necess-
arily resulted in different patterns of motor output following the differ-
ent intelligibility conditions, but was not expected to affect neural
activity during perception. Each trial began with a short auditory tone
and a delay of between 800 and 1800 ms before sentence presentation.
Following each sentence, participants repeated back as many words as
possible and pressed a key to indicate they were nished; they had as
much time to respond as they needed. The time between this key
press and the next trial was randomly varied between 1500 and 2500
ms. Data collection was broken into 5 blocks (i.e. periods of continu-
ous data collection lasting approximately 1012 min), with sentences
randomly assigned across blocks. (For 5 participants, a programming
error resulted in them not hearing any 4 channel rotated sentences,
but these were replaced with additional 1 channel sentences. Analyses
including the 4 channel rotated condition are performed on only 11
participants hearing this condition.) Stimuli were presented using
E-Prime 1.0 software (Psychology Software Tools Inc., Pittsburgh, PA,
USA), and participants word recall was recorded for later analysis.
Equipment malfunction resulted in loss of word report data for 5 of
the participants, and thus word report scores are reported only for the
participants who had behavioral data in all conditions.
MEG and Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) Data Collection
MEG data were acquired with a high-density whole-scalp VectorView
MEG system (Elekta-Neuromag, Helsinki, Finland), containing a mag-
netometer and 2 orthogonal planar gradiometers located at each of 102
positions (306 sensors total), housed in a light magnetically shielded
room. Data were sampled at 1 kHz with a bandpass lter from 0.03 to
330 Hz. A 3D digitizer (Fastrak Polhemus Inc., Colchester, VA, USA)
was used to record the positions of 4 head position indicator (HPI)
coils and 50100 additional points evenly distributed over the scalp, all
relative to the nasion and left and right preauricular points. Head pos-
ition was continuously monitored using the HPI coils, which allowed
for movement compensation across the entire recording session. For
each participant, structural MRI images with 1 mm isotropic voxels
were obtained using a 3D magnetization-prepared rapid gradient
echo sequence (repetition time = 2250 ms, echo time = 2.99 ms, ip
angle = 9, acceleration factor = 2) on a 3 T Tim Trio Siemens scanner
(Siemens Medical Systems, Erlangen, Germany).
MEG Data Analysis
External noise was removed from the MEG data using the temporal
extension of Signal-Space Separation (Taulu et al. 2005) implemented
in MaxFilter 2.0 (Elekta-Neuromag). The MEG data were continuously
compensated for head movement, and bad channels (identied via
visual inspection or MaxFilter; ranging from 1 to 6 per participant)
were replaced by interpolation. Subsequent analysis of oscillatory
activity was performed using FieldTrip (Donders Institute for Brain,
Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University Nijmegen, The Nether-
lands: http://www.ru.nl/neuroimaging/eldtrip/). In order to quantify
phase locking between the acoustic signal and neural oscillations we
used coherence, a frequency-domain measure that reects the degree
to which the phase relationships of 2 signals are consistent across
measurements, normalized to lie between 0 and 1. In the context of
the current study, this indicates the consistency of phase locking of
the acoustic and neural data across trials, which we refer to as
cerebro-acoustic coherence. Importantly, coherence directly quanties
the synchronization of the acoustic envelope and neural oscillations,
unlike previous studies that have looked at the consistency of neural
response across trials without explicitly examining its relationship
with the acoustic envelope (Luo and Poeppel 2007; Howard and
Poeppel 2010; Kerlin et al. 2010; Luo et al. 2010).
The data were transformed from the time to frequency domain
using a fast Fourier transform (FFT) applied to the whole trial for all
MEG signals and acoustic envelopes using a Hanning window, produ-
cing spectra with a frequency resolution of approximately 0.3 Hz. The
cross-spectral density was computed for all combinations of MEG
channels and acoustic signals. We then extracted the mean cross-
spectral density of all sensor combinations in the selected frequency
band. We used dynamic imaging of coherent sources (DICS) (Gross
et al. 2001) to determine the spatial distribution of brain areas coher-
ent to the speech envelope. This avoids making the inaccurate as-
sumption that specic sensors correspond across individuals despite
different head shapes and orientations, although results must be inter-
preted within the limitations of MEG source localization accuracy. It
also allows data to be combined over recordings from magnetometer
and gradiometer sensors. DICS is based on a linearly constrained
minimal variance beamformer (Van Veen et al. 1997) in the frequency
domain and allows us to compute coherence between neural activity
at each voxel and the acoustic envelope. The beamformer is character-
ized by a set of coefcients that are the solutions to a constrained
minimization problem, ensuring that the beamformer passes activity
from a given voxel while maximally suppressing activity from all
other brain areas. Coefcients are computed from the cross-spectral
density and the solution to the forward problem for each voxel. The
solution to the forward problem was based on the single shell model
(Nolte 2003). This dominant orientation was computed for each voxel
from the rst eigenvector of the cross-spectral density matrix between
both tangential orientations. The resulting beamformer coefcients
were used to compute coherence between acoustic and cortical
signals in a large number of voxels covering the entire brain.
Computations were performed separately for 4, 5, 6, and 7 Hz and
then averaged before performing group statistics. For each partici-
pant, we also conducted coherence analyses on 100 random pairings
of acoustic and cerebral data, which we averaged to produce random
coherence images. The resulting tomographic maps were spatially
normalized to Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI) space, resampled
to 4 mm isotropic voxels, and averaged across 47 Hz. Voxel-based
group analyses were performed using 1-sample t-tests and region of
1380 Phase-Locked Responses to Speech Rhythm Peelle et al.

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interest (ROI) analyses in SPM8 (Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroima-
ging, London, UK). Results are displayed using MNI-space templates
included with SPM8 and MRIcron (Rorden and Brett 2000).
Results
Acoustic Properties of the Sentences
To characterize the acoustic properties of the stimuli, we per-
formed a frequency analysis of all sentence envelopes using a
multitaper FFT with Slepian tapers. The spectral power for all
sentence envelopes averaged across condition is shown in
Figure 1C, along with a 1/f line to indicate the expected noise
prole (Voss and Clarke 1975). The shaded region indicates
the range between 4 and 7 Hz, where we anticipated maximal
power in the speech signal. The residual power spectra after
removing the 1/f trend using linear regression are shown in
Figure 1D. This shows a clear peak in the 47 Hz range
(shaded) that is consistent across condition. These ndings,
along with previous studies, motivated our focus on
cerebro-acoustic coherence between 4 and 7 Hz, which is well
matched over all 4 forms of noise vocoding.
Behavioral Results
To conrm that the intelligibility manipulations worked as in-
tended, we analyzed participants word report data, shown in
Figure 1E. As expected, the 1 channel (M= 0.1%, SD= 0.1%,
range = 0.00.6%) and 4 channel rotated (M= 0.2%, SD= 0.1%,
range = 0.00.4%) conditions were unintelligible with essen-
tially zero word report. Accuracy for these unintelligible con-
ditions did not differ from each other (P = 0.38), assessed by a
nonparametric sign test. The word report for the 16 channel
condition was near ceiling (M= 97.9%, SD= 1.5%, range =
94.499.6%) and signicantly greater than that for the 4
channel condition (M= 27.9%, SD= 8.2%, range = 19.141.6%)
[t(8) = 26.00, P < 0.001 (nonparametric sign test P < 0.005)].
The word report in the 4 channel condition was signicantly
better than that in the 4 channel rotated condition [t(8) =
10.26, P < 0.001 (nonparametric sign test P < 0.005)]. Thus,
connected speech remains intelligible if it is presented with
sufcient spectral detail in appropriate frequency ranges (i.e.
a multichannel, nonrotated vocoder). These behavioral results
also suggest that the largest difference in phase locking will
be seen between the fully intelligible 16 channel condition
and 1 of the unintelligible control conditions. Because the 4
channel and 4 channel rotated conditions are the most closely
matched acoustically but differ in intelligibility, these behav-
ioral results suggest 2 complementary predictions: rst, coher-
ence is greater in the 16 channel condition than in the 1
channel condition; secondly, coherence is greater in the 4
channel condition than in the 4 channel rotated condition.
Cerebro-Acoustic Coherence
We rst analyzed MEG data in sensor space to examine
cerebro-acoustic coherence across a range of frequencies. For
each participant, we selected the magnetometer with the
highest summed coherence values between 0 and 20 Hz. For
that sensor, we then plotted coherence as a function of fre-
quency, as shown in Figure 2A for 2 example participants.
For each participant, we also conducted a nonparametric per-
mutation analysis in which we calculated coherence for 5000
random pairings of acoustic envelopes with neural data;
based on the distribution of values obtained through these
random pairings, we were able to determine the chance of
obtaining coherence values for the true pairing. In both the
example participants, we see a coherence peak between 4
and 7 Hz that exceeds the P < 0.005 threshold based on this
permutation analysis. For these 2 participants, greatest coher-
ence in this frequency range is seen in bilateral frontocentral
sensors (Fig. 2A). The maximum-magnetometer coherence
plot averaged across all 16 participants, shown in Figure 2B,
also shows a clear peak between 4 and 7 Hz. This is consist-
ent with both the acoustic characteristics of the stimuli and
the previous literature, and therefore supports our decision to
focus on this frequency range for further analyses.
We next conducted a whole-brain analysis on source-
localized data to see whether the unintelligible 1 channel con-
dition showed signicantly greater coherence between the
neural and acoustic data than that seen in random pairings of
acoustic envelopes and neural data. These results are shown
in Figure 3A using a voxel-wise threshold of P < 0.001 and a
P < 0.05 whole-brain cluster extent correction for multiple
comparisons using random eld theory (Worsley et al. 1992).
This analysis revealed a number of regions that show signi-
cant phase locking to the acoustic envelope in the absence of
linguistic information, including bilateral superior and middle
temporal gyri, inferior frontal gyri, and motor cortex.
Previous electrophysiological studies in nonhuman pri-
mates have focused on phase locking to rhythmic stimuli in
primary auditory cortex. In humans, primary auditory cortex
is the rst cortical region in a hierarchical speech-processing
network (Rauschecker and Scott 2009), and is thus a sensible
place to look for neural responses that are phase locked to
acoustic input. To assess the existence and laterality of
cerebro-acoustic coherence in primary auditory cortex, we
used the SPM Anatomy toolbox (Eickhoff et al. 2005) to delin-
eate bilateral auditory cortex ROIs, which comprised regions
TE1.0, TE1.1, and TE1.2 (Morosan et al. 2001): regions were
identied using maximum probability maps derived from cy-
toarchitectonic analysis of postmortem samples. We extracted
coherence values from these ROIs for the actual and random
pairings of acoustic and neural data for both 16 channel and 1
channel stimuli, shown in Figure 3B. Given the limited accu-
racy of MEG source localization, and the smoothness of the
source estimates, measures of phase locking considered in
this analysis may also originate from surrounding regions of
superior temporal gyrus (e.g. auditory belt or parabelt).
However, by using this pair of anatomical ROIs, we can
ensure that the lateralization of auditory oscillations is as-
sessed in an unbiased fashion. We submitted the extracted
data to a 3-way hemisphere (left/right) number of channels
(16/1) pairing (normal/random) repeated-measures analysis of
variance (ANOVA). This analysis showed no main effect of
hemisphere (F
1,15
< 1, n.s.), but a main effect of the number
of channels (F
1,15
= 6.4, P < 0.05) and pairing (F
1,15
= 24.7, P <
0.001). These results reect greater coherence for the 16
channel speech than for the 1 channel speech and greater co-
herence for the true pairing than for the random pairing. Most
relevant for the current investigation was the signicant 3-way
hemisphere number of channels pairing interaction (F
1,15
= 4.5, P < 0.001), indicating that the phase-locked response
was enhanced in the left auditory cortex during the more in-
telligible 16 channel condition (number of channels pairing
interaction: F
1,15
= 10.53, P = 0.005), but not in the right
Cerebral Cortex June 2013, V 23 N 6 1381

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auditory cortex (number of channels pairing interaction:
F
1,15
< 1, n.s.). This conrms that cerebro-acoustic coherence
in left auditory cortex, but not in right auditory cortex, is sig-
nicantly increased for intelligible speech.
To assess effects of intelligibility on cerebro-acoustic coher-
ence more broadly we conducted a whole-brain search for
regions in which coherence was higher for the intelligible 16
channel speech than for the unintelligible 1 channel speech,
using a voxel-wise threshold of P < 0.001, corrected for mul-
tiple comparisons (P < 0.05) using cluster extent. As shown in
Figure 4A, this analysis revealed a signicant cluster of greater
coherence centered on the left middle temporal gyrus [13
824 L: peak at (60, 16, 8), Z = 4.11], extending into both
inferior and superior temporal gyri. A second cluster extended
from the medial to the lateral surface of left ventral inferior
frontal cortex [17 920 L: peak at (8, 40, 20), Z = 3.56].
A third cluster was also observed in the left inferior frontal
gyrus [1344 L: peak at (60, 36, 16), Z = 3.28], although
this was too small to pass whole-brain cluster extent cor-
rection (and thus not shown in Fig. 4). (We conducted an
additional analysis in which the source reconstructions were
calculated on a single frequency range of 47 Hz, as opposed
to averaging separate source localizations, as described
in Materials and Methods. This analysis resulted in the same
2 signicant clusters of increased coherence in nearly identi-
cal locations.)
We conducted ROI analyses to assess which of these areas
respond differentially to 4 channel vocoded sentences that are
moderately intelligible or made unintelligible by spectral
rotation. This comparison is of special interest because these
2 conditions are matched for spectral complexity (i.e. contain
the same number of frequency bands), but differ markedly in
intelligibility. We extracted coherence values for each con-
dition from a sphere (5 mm radius) centered on the middle
temporal gyrus peak identied in the 16 channel > 1 channel
comparison, shown in Figure 4B. In addition to the expected
Figure 2. Sensor level cerebro-acoustic coherence for magnetometer sensors. (A) For 2 example participants, the magnetometer with the maximum coherence values (across
all frequencies) was selected. Coherence values were then plotted at this sensor as a function of frequency, along with signicance levels based on permutation analyses (see
text). Topographic plots of coherence values for all magnetometers, as well as a topographic plot showing signicance values, are also displayed. (B) Coherence values as a
function of frequency computed as above, but averaged for the maximum coherence magnetometer in all 16 listeners. Minimum and maximum values across subjects are also
shown in the shaded portion. Coherence values show a clear peak in the 47 Hz range.
1382 Phase-Locked Responses to Speech Rhythm Peelle et al.

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difference between 16 and 1 channel sentences [t(10) = 3.8, P
< 0.005 (one-sided)], we found increased coherence for mod-
erately intelligible 4 channel speech compared with unintelli-
gible 4 channel rotated speech [t(10) = 2.1, P < 0.05]. We also
conducted an exploratory whole-brain analysis to identify any
additional regions in which coherence was higher for the 4
channel condition than for the 4 channel rotated condition;
however, no regions reached whole-brain signicance.
Figure 3. Source-localized cerebro-acoustic coherence results. (A) Source localization showing signicant cerebro-acoustic coherence in the unintelligible 1 channel condition
compared to a permutation-derived null baseline derived from random pairings of acoustic envelopes to MEG data across all participants. Effects shown are whole-brain corrected
(P < 0.05). (B) ROI analysis on coherence values extracted from probabilistically dened primary auditory cortex regions relative to coherence for random pairings of acoustic and
cerebral trials. Data showed a signicant hemisphere number of channels normal/random interaction (P < 0.001).
Figure 4. Linguistic inuences on cerebro-acoustic coherence. (A) Group analysis showing neural sources in which intelligible 16 channel vocoded speech led to signicantly
greater coherence with the acoustic envelope than the 1 channel vocoded speech. Effects shown are whole-brain corrected (P < 0.05). Coronal slices shown from an MNI
standard brain at 8 mm intervals. (B) For a 5 mm radius sphere around the middle temporal gyrus peak (60, 16, 8), the 4 channel vocoded speech also showed signicantly
greater coherence than the 4 channel rotated vocoded speech, despite being equated for spectral detail. (C) Analysis of the rst and second halves of each sentence conrms
that results were not driven by sentence onset effects: there was no main effect of sentence half nor an interaction with condition.
Cerebral Cortex June 2013, V 23 N 6 1383

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We next investigated whether coherence varied within a
condition as a function of intelligibility, as indexed by word
report scores. Coherence values for the 4 channel condition,
which showed the most behavioral variability, were not corre-
lated with single-subject word report scores across partici-
pants or with differences between high- and low-intelligibility
sentences within each participant. Similar comparisons of co-
herence in an ROI centered on the peak of the signicant
frontal cluster for 4 channel and 4 channel rotated speech
and between-subject correlations were nonsignicant (all
Ps > 0.53). An exploratory whole-brain analysis also failed to
reveal any regions in which coherence was signicantly corre-
lated with word report scores.
Finally, we conducted an additional analysis to verify that
coherence in the middle temporal gyrus was not driven by
differential responses to the acoustic onset of intelligible sen-
tences. We therefore performed the same coherence analysis
as before on the rst and second halves of each sentence sep-
arately, as shown in Figure 4C. If acoustic onset responses
were responsible for our coherence results, we would expect
coherence to be higher at the beginning than at the end of
the sentence. We submitted the data from the middle tem-
poral gyrus ROI to a condition rst/second half repeated-
measures ANOVA. There was no effect of half (F
10,30
< 1) nor
an interaction between condition and half (F
10,30
< 1). Thus,
we conclude that the effects of speech intelligibility on
cerebro-acoustic coherence in the left middle temporal gyrus
are equally present throughout the duration of a sentence.
Discussion
Entraining to rhythmic environmental cues is a fundamental
ability of sensory systems in the brain. This oscillatory track-
ing of ongoing physical signals aids temporal prediction of
future events and facilitates efcient processing of rapid
sensory input by modulating baseline neural excitability
(Arieli et al. 1996; Busch et al. 2009; Romei et al. 2010). In
humans, rhythmic entrainment is also evident in the percep-
tion and social coordination of movement, music, and speech
(Gross et al. 2002; Peelle and Wingeld 2005; Shockley et al.
2007; Cummins 2009; Grahn and Rowe 2009). Here, we show
that cortical oscillations become more closely phase locked to
slow uctuations in the speech signal when linguistic infor-
mation is available. This is consistent with our hypothesis that
rhythmic entrainment relies on the integration of multiple
sources of knowledge, and not just sensory cues.
There is growing consensus concerning the network of
brain regions that support the comprehension of connected
speech, which minimally include bilateral superior temporal
cortex, more extensive left superior and middle temporal gyri,
and left inferior frontal cortex (Bates et al. 2003; Davis and
Johnsrude 2003, 2007; Scott and Johnsrude 2003; Peelle et al.
2010). Despite agreement on the localization of the brain
regions involved, far less is known about their function. Our
current results demonstrate that a portion of left temporal
cortex, commonly identied in positron emission tomography
(PET) and functional MRI (fMRI) studies of spoken language
(Davis and Johnsrude 2003; Scott et al. 2006; Davis et al.
2007; Friederici et al. 2010; Rodd et al. 2010), shows in-
creased phase locking with the speech signal when speech is
intelligible. These ndings suggest that the distributed speech
comprehension network expresses predictions that aid the
processing of incoming acoustic information by enhancing
phase-locked activity. Extraction of the linguistic content gen-
erates expectations for upcoming speech rhythm through pre-
diction of specic lexical items (DeLong et al. 2005) or by
anticipating clause boundaries (Grosjean 1983), as well as
other prosodic elements that have rhythmic correlates appar-
ent in the amplitude envelope (Rosen 1992). Thus, speech in-
telligibility is enhanced by rhythmic knowledge, which in
turn provides the linguistic information necessary for the reci-
procal prediction of upcoming acoustic signals. We propose
that this positive feedback cycle is neurally instantiated by
cerebro-acoustic phase locking.
We note that the effects of intelligibility on phase-locked
responses are seen in relatively low-level auditory regions of
temporal cortex. Although this nding must be interpreted
within the limits of MEG source localization, it is consistent
with electrophysiological studies in nonhuman primates in
which source localization is straightforward (Lakatos et al.
2005, 2007), as well as with interpretations of previous elec-
trophysiological studies in humans (Luo and Poeppel 2007;
Luo et al. 2010). The sensitivity of phase locking in auditory
areas to speech intelligibility suggests that regions that are
anatomically early in the hierarchy of speech processing show
sensitivity to linguistic information. One interpretation of this
nding is that primary auditory regionseither in primary
auditory cortex proper, or in neighboring regions that are syn-
chronously activeare directly sensitive to linguistic content
in intelligible speech. However, there is consensus that
during speech comprehension, these early auditory regions
do not function in isolation, but as part of an anatomical
functional hierarchy (Davis and Johnsrude 2003; Scott and
Johnsrude 2003; Hickok and Poeppel 2007; Rauschecker and
Scott 2009; Peelle et al. 2010). In the context of such a hier-
archical model of speech comprehension, a more plausible
explanation is that increased phase locking of oscillations in
auditory cortex to intelligible speech reects the numerous
efferent auditory connections that provide input to auditory
cortex from secondary auditory areas and beyond (Hackett
et al. 1999, 2007; de la Mothe et al. 2006). The latter interpret-
ation is also consistent with proposals of top-down or predic-
tive inuences of higher-level content on low-level acoustic
processes that contribute to the comprehension of spoken
language (Davis and Johnsrude 2007; Gagnepain et al. 2012;
Wild et al. 2012).
An important aspect of the current study is that we manipu-
lated intelligibility by varying the number and spectral order-
ing of channels in vocoded speech. Increasing the number of
channels increases the complexity of the spectral information
in speech, but does not change its overall amplitude envel-
ope. Greater spectral detailwhich aids intelligibilityis
created by having different amplitude envelopes in different
frequency bands. That is, in the case of 1 channel vocoded
speech, there is a single amplitude envelope applied across
all frequency bands and therefore no conicting information;
in the case of 16 channel vocoded speech, there are 16 non-
identical amplitude envelopes, each presented in a narrow
spectral band. If coherence is driven solely by acoustic uctu-
ations, then we might expect that presentation of a mixture of
different amplitude envelopes would reduce cerebro-acoustic
coherence. Conversely, if rhythmic entrainment reects neural
processes that track intelligible speech signals, we would
expect the reverse, namely increased coherence for speech
1384 Phase-Locked Responses to Speech Rhythm Peelle et al.

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signals with multiple envelopes. The latter result is precisely
what we observed.
In noise-vocoded speech, using more channels results in
greater spectral detail and concomitant increases in intellig-
ibility. One might thus argue that the observed increases in
cerebro-acoustic coherence in the intelligible 16 channel con-
dition were not due to the availability of linguistic infor-
mation, but to the different spectral proles associated with
these stimuli. However, this confound is not present in the
4 channel and 4 channel rotated conditions, which differ in
intelligibility but are well matched for spectral complexity.
Our comparison of responses with 4 channel and spectrally
rotated 4 channel vocoded sentences thus demonstrates that it
is intelligibility, rather than dynamic spectral change created
by multiple amplitude envelopes (Roberts et al. 2011), that is
critical for enhancing cerebro-acoustic coherence. Our results
show signicantly increased cerebro-acoustic coherence for
the more-intelligible, nonrotated 4 channel sentences in the
left temporal cortex. Again, this anatomical locus is in agree-
ment with PET and fMRI studies comparing similar stimuli
(Scott et al. 2000; Obleser et al. 2007; Okada et al. 2010).
We note with interest that both our oscillatory responses
and fMRI responses to intelligible sentences are largely left la-
teralized. In our study, both left and right auditory cortices
show above-chance coherence with the amplitude envelope
of vocoded speech, but it is only in the left hemisphere that
coherence is enhanced for intelligible speech conditions. This
nding stands in contrast to previous observations of right la-
teralized oscillatory responses in similar frequency ranges
shown with electroencephalography and fMRI during rest
(Giraud et al. 2007) or in fMRI responses to nonspeech
sounds (Boemio et al. 2005). Our ndings, therefore, chal-
lenge the proposal that neural lateralization for speech pro-
cessing is due solely to asymmetric temporal sampling of
acoustic features (Poeppel 2003). Instead, we support the
view that it is the presence of linguistic content, rather than
specic acoustic features, that is critical in changing the later-
alization of observed neural responses (Rosen et al. 2011;
McGettigan et al. 2012). Some of these apparently contradic-
tory previous ndings may be explained by the fact that the
salience and inuence of linguistic content are markedly
different during full attention to trial-unique sentencesas is
the case in both the current study and natural speech compre-
hensionthan in listening situations in which a limited set of
sentences is repeated often (Luo and Poeppel 2007) or unat-
tended (Abrams et al. 2008).
The lack of a correlation between behavioral word report
and coherence across participants in the 4 channel condition
is slightly puzzling. However, we note that there was only a
range of approximately 20% accuracy across all participants
word report scores. Our prediction is that if we were to use a
slightly more intelligible manipulation (e.g. 6 or 8 channel vo-
coding) or other conditions that produce a broader range of
behavioral scores, such a correlation would indeed be appar-
ent. Further research along these lines would be valuable in
testing for more direct links between intelligibility and phase
locking (cf. Ahissar et al. 2001).
Other studies have shown time-locked neural responses to
auditory stimuli at multiple levels of the human auditory
system, including auditory brainstem responses (Skoe and
Kraus 2010) and auditory steady-state responses in cortex
(Picton et al. 2003). These ndings reect replicable neural
responses to predictable acoustic stimuli that have high tem-
poral resolution and (for the auditory steady-state response)
are extended in time. To date, there has been no convincing
evidence that cortical phase-locked activity in response to
connected speech reects anything more than an acoustic-
following response for more complex stimuli. For example,
Howard and Poeppel (2010) conclude that cortical phase
locking to speech is based on acoustic information because
theta-phase responses can discriminate both normal and tem-
porally reversed sentences with equal accuracy, despite the
latter being incomprehensible. Our current results similarly
conrm that neural oscillations can entrain to unintelligible
stimuli and would therefore discriminate different temporal
acoustic proles, irrespective of linguistic content. However,
the fact that these entrained responses are signicantly en-
hanced when linguistic information is available indicates that
it is not solely acoustic factors that drive phase locking during
natural speech comprehension.
Although we contend that phase locking of neural oscil-
lations to sensory information can increase the efciency of
perception, rhythmic entrainment is clearly not a prerequisite
for successful perceptual processing. Intelligibility depends
on the ability to extract linguistic content from speech: this is
more difcult, but not impossible, when rhythm is perturbed.
For example, in everyday life we may encounter foreign-
accented or dysarthric speakers that produce disrupted
speech rhythms but are nonetheless intelligible with
additional listener effort (Tajima et al. 1997; Liss et al. 2009).
Similarly, short fragments of connected speech presented in
the absence of a rhythmic context (including single monosyl-
labic words) are often signicantly less intelligible than con-
nected speech, but can still be correctly perceived (Pickett
and Pollack 1963). Indeed, from a broader perspective, organ-
isms are perfectly capable of processing stimuli that do not
occur as part of a rhythmic pattern. Thus, although adaptive
and often present in natural language processing, rhythmic
structure and cerebro-acoustic coupling are not necessary for
successful speech comprehension.
Previous research has focussed on the integration of multi-
sensory cues in unisensory cortex (Schroeder and Foxe
2005). Complementing these studies, here we have shown
that human listeners are able to additionally integrate nonsen-
sory information to enhance the phase locking of oscillations
in auditory cortex to acoustic cues. Our results thus support
the hypothesis that organisms are able to integrate multiple
forms of nonsensory information to aid stimulus prediction.
Although in humans this clearly includes linguistic infor-
mation, it may also include constraints such as probabilistic
relationships between stimuli or contextual associations
which can be tested in other species. This integration would
be facilitated, for example, by the extensive reciprocal connec-
tions among multisensory, prefrontal, and parietal regions
and auditory cortex in nonhuman primates (Hackett et al.
1999, 2007; Romanski et al. 1999; Petrides and Pandya 2006,
2007).
Taken together, our results demonstrate that the phase of
ongoing neural oscillations is impacted not only by sensory
input, but also by the integration of nonsensoryin this case,
linguisticinformation. Cerebro-acoustic coherence thus pro-
vides a neural mechanism that allows the brain of a listener to
respond to incoming speech information at the optimal rate
for comprehension, enhancing sensitivity to relevant dynamic
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spectral change (Summereld 1981; Dilley and Pitt 2010). We
propose that during natural comprehension, acoustic and lin-
guistic information act in a reciprocally supportive manner to
aid in the prediction of ongoing speech stimuli.
Authors Contribution
J.E.P., J.G., and M.H.D. designed the research, analyzed the
data, and wrote the paper. J.E.P. performed the research.
Funding
The research was supported by the UK Medical Research
Council (MC-A060-5PQ80). Funding to pay the Open Access
publication charges for this article was provided by the UK
Medical Research Council.
Notes
We are grateful to Clare Cook, Oleg Korzyukov, Marie Smith, and
Maarten van Casteren for assistance with data collection, Jason Taylor
and Rik Henson for helpful discussions regarding data processing,
and our volunteers for their participation. We thank Michael Bonner,
Bob Carlyon, Jessica Grahn, Olaf Hauk, and Yury Shtyrov for helpful
comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript. Conict of Interest:
None declared.
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