Syllable-Initial Phonemes Affect Neural Entrainment to Consonant-Vowel Syllables

Neural entrainment to speech appears to rely on syllabic features, especially those pertaining to the acoustic envelope of the stimuli. It has been proposed that the neural tracking of speech depends on the phoneme features. In the present electroencephalography experiment, we examined data from 25 participants to investigate neural entrainment to near-isochronous stimuli comprising syllables beginning with different phonemes. We measured the inter-trial phase coherence of neural responses to these stimuli and assessed the relationship between this coherence and acoustic properties of the stimuli designed to quantify their edginess. We found that entrainment was different across different classes of the syllable-initial phoneme and that entrainment depended on the amount of edge in the sound envelope. In particular, the best edge marker and predictor of entrainment was the latency of the maximum derivative of each syllable.

Automated summary

This experiment investigated the reliance of neural entrainment to speech on syllabic features, and found that neural entrainment differed across different syllable-initial phonemes and depended on the sharpness of the sound envelope.