Predicting Speech: Cortical Oscillations and Dynamics

言语是一种复杂多变的媒介，但当我们用母语倾听时，理解似乎毫不费力，而且是自动的。同时，通过母语的经验，我们对母语在声音、单词和句子层面上的结构有了丰富的了解。最近的工作已经开始强调这方面的知识在实时语言处理的重要性。一个可以塑造语言理解的轻松性质的总体机制是利用我们语言结构的先验知识来预测语言分析各个层面的即将到来的信息，从而促进对未来信息的处理。我的五年研究计划是确定这种预测是如何编码在语音感知期间神经振荡的时间和空间动态中的：语言理解的最早阶段。特别是，这项研究建立在最近的发现，已经确定了在言语感知预测的大脑标记。

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.