Attentional Engagement with Target and Distractor Streams Predicts Speech Comprehension in Multitalker Environments
- Alice Vivien Barchet1,2,3,
- Andrea Bruera1,
- Jasmin Wend1,
- Johanna M. Rimmele4,
- Jonas Obleser5,6, and
- Gesa Hartwigsen1,2
- 1Research Group Cognition and Plasticity, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig 04103, Germany
- 2Cognitive and Biological Psychology, Leipzig University, Leipzig 04109, Germany
- 3International Max Planck Research School on Cognitive NeuroImaging (IMPRS CoNI), Leipzig 04103, Germany
- 4Department of Cognitive Neuropsychology, Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Frankfurt 60322, Germany
- 5Department of Psychology, University of Lübeck, Lübeck 23562, Germany
- 6Center of Brain, Behavior, and Metabolism, University of Lübeck, Lübeck 23562, Germany
-
Author Contributions: A.V.B., A.B., J.M.R., J.O., and G.H. designed research; A.V.B., A.B., and J.W. performed research; A.V.B. analyzed data; A.V.B. wrote the first draft of the paper; A.V.B., A.B., J.W., J.M.R., J.O., and G.H. edited the paper.
Abstract
Understanding speech while ignoring competing speech streams in the surrounding environment is challenging. Previous studies have demonstrated that attention shapes the neural representation of speech features. Attended streams are typically represented more strongly than unattended ones, suggesting either enhancement of the attended or suppression of the unattended stream. However, it is unclear how these complementary processes support attentional filtering and speech comprehension on different hierarchical levels. In this study, we used multivariate temporal response functions to analyze the EEG signals of 43 young adults (24 women), examining the relationship between the neural tracking of acoustic and higher-level linguistic features and a fine-grained speech comprehension measure. We show that the neural tracking of word and phoneme onsets and word level linguistic features in the attended stream predicted comprehension at the individual single-trial level. Moreover, acoustic tracking of the ignored speech stream was positively correlated with comprehension performance, whereas word level linguistic neural tracking of the ignored stream was negatively correlated with comprehension. Collectively, our results suggest that attentional filtering during speech comprehension requires target enhancement as well as distractor suppression at different hierarchical levels.
- Received April 1, 2025.
- Revision received September 4, 2025.
- Accepted September 13, 2025.
- Copyright © 2025 Barchet et al.
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium provided that the original work is properly attributed.
