Lip movements entrain the observers' low-frequency brain oscillations to facilitate speech intelligibility

During continuous speech, lip movements provide visual temporal signals that facilitate speech processing. Here, using MEG we directly investigated how these visual signals interact with rhythmic brain activity in participants listening to and seeing the speaker. First, we investigated coherence bet...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:eLife 2016-05, Vol.5
Main Authors: Park, Hyojin, Kayser, Christoph, Thut, Gregor, Gross, Joachim
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Accuracy
Acoustic Stimulation
Acoustics
Adolescent
Adult
Animal behavior
Attention
Brain Waves
Cortex (motor)
Ears & hearing
electroencephalography
Entrainment
Female
Healthy Volunteers
Humans
language
Lip
Lip - physiology
lip movements
magnetoencephalography
Male
Motor Cortex - physiology
Movement
Neural circuitry
Neuroscience
Oscillations
Physiological aspects
Psychological aspects
Psychomotor Performance
Rhythms
Sensory integration
Speech
Speech Intelligibility
Speech production
Synchronization
Temporal cortex
Visual Cortex
Young Adult
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Summary:During continuous speech, lip movements provide visual temporal signals that facilitate speech processing. Here, using MEG we directly investigated how these visual signals interact with rhythmic brain activity in participants listening to and seeing the speaker. First, we investigated coherence between oscillatory brain activity and speaker's lip movements and demonstrated significant entrainment in visual cortex. We then used partial coherence to remove contributions of the coherent auditory speech signal from the lip-brain coherence. Comparing this synchronization between different attention conditions revealed that attending visual speech enhances the coherence between activity in visual cortex and the speaker's lips. Further, we identified a significant partial coherence between left motor cortex and lip movements and this partial coherence directly predicted comprehension accuracy. Our results emphasize the importance of visually entrained and attention-modulated rhythmic brain activity for the enhancement of audiovisual speech processing.
ISSN:2050-084X
2050-084X
DOI:10.7554/eLife.14521