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Abstract:
When listening to speech, the brain is known to ‘track’ the spoken signal by phase-locking neural oscillations to the syllabic rate of speech. It remains debated, however, whether this neural entrainment actively shapes speech perception or whether it is merely an epiphenomenon of speech processing. This study, presenting neuroimaging (MEG) and psychoacoustic evidence, reveals that entrained oscillations persist for several cycles after the driving rhythm has ceased. This sustained entrainment, in turn, influences the temporal sampling of subsequent speech segments, biasing ambiguous vowels towards long/short percepts. Thus, these experiments demonstrate the influential role of neural entrainment in speech perception.
