Predicting Speech: Cortical Oscillations and Dynamics

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Speech is a complex and variable medium, and yet when we listen in our native language, comprehension appears effortless and automatic. Simultaneously, through experience with our native language, we have a wealth of knowledge about how it is structured at the level of sounds, words, and sentences. Recent work has begun to emphasize the importance of this knowledge during real-time language processing. One overarching mechanism that could shape the effortless nature of language comprehension is leveraging prior knowledge of our language’s structure to predict upcoming information at all levels of linguistic analysis, thereby facilitating the processing of future information. My five-year research program is to identify how this prediction is encoded in the temporal and spatial dynamics of neural oscillations during speech perception: the earliest stages of language comprehension. In particular, this research builds on recent findings which have identified a brain marker of prediction during speech perception.