Some Core Facts About Event-Related Brain Potentials (ERPs)
Speech and its acoustic and linguistic properties essentially evolve in time (Kotz and Schwartze 2010). Therefore, high-temporal-resolution methods such as the electroencephalography (EEG) or magnetoencephalography (MEG) are well suited to trace the temporal unfolding of the speech signal. In particular, ERPs embedded in the EEG permit speech to be monitored with millisecond resolution. By time-locking and averaging ERPs to a large number of specific and similar speech events, responses to acoustic and linguistic properties of these events can tell us how an event is perceived and understood as it occurs. The resulting wavelike pattern consists of an alteration of positive and negative peaks that, when compared to a control condition, leads to the emergence of components that are defined by their polarity (positive or negative), by the delay after the onset of an event of interest (latency), and by their distribution across...
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
References
Aydelott J, Dick F, Mills DL (2006) Effects of acoustic distortion and semantic context on event-related potentials to spoken words. Psychophysiology 43(5):454–464
Bonte M, Valente G, Formisano E (2009) Dynamic and task-dependent encoding of speech and voice by phase reorganization of cortical oscillations. J Neurosci 29:1699–1706
Boulenger V, Hoen M, Jacquier C, Meunier F (2011) Interplay between acoustic/phonetic and semantic processes during spoken sentence comprehension: an ERP study. Brain Lang 116(2):51–63
Chwilla DJ, Brown CM, Hagoort P (1995) The N400 as a function of the level of processing. Psychophysiology 32(3):274–285
Friederici AD (2002) Towards a neural basis of auditory sentence processing. Trends Cogn Sci 6(2):78–84
Holcomb PJ (1988) Automatic and attentional processing: an event-related brain potential analysis of semantic priming. Brain Lang 35(1):66–85
Kotz SA, Schwartze M (2010) Cortical speech processing unplugged: a timely subcortico-cortical framework. Trends Cogn Sci 14(9):392–399
Kutas M, Federmeier KD (2011) Thirty years and counting: finding meaning in the N400 component of the event-related brain potential (ERP). Annu Rev Psychol 62:621–647
Kutas M, Hillyard SA (1980) Event-related brain potentials to semantically inappropriate and surprisingly large words. Biol Psychol 11(2):99–116
Kutas M, Hillyard SA (1984) Brain potentials during reading reflect word expectancy and semantic association. Nature 307:161–163
Lau EF, Phillips C, Poeppel D (2008) A cortical network for semantics: (de-)constructing the N400. Nat Rev Neurosci 9:920–933
Luck SJ (2005) An introduction to the event-related potential technique. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA
Martin BA, Tremblay KL, Kroczak P (2008) Speech evoked potentials: from the laboratory to the clinic. Ear Hearing 29:285–313
Miettinen I, Tiitinen H, Alku P, May PJ (2010) Sensitivity of the human auditory cortex to acoustic degradation of speech and non-speech sounds. BMC Neurosci 11:24
Näätänen R (2001) The perception of speech sounds by the human brain as reflected by the mismatch negativity (MMN) and its magnetic equivalent (MMNm). Psychophysiology 38:1–21
Obleser J, Kotz SA (2010) Expectancy constraints in degraded speech modulate the language comprehension network. Cereb Cortex 20(3):633–640
Obleser J, Kotz SA (2011) Multiple brain electric signatures of semantic constraints in degraded speech. Neuroimage 55(2):713–723
Obleser J, Elbert T, Eulitz C (2004) Attentional influences on functional mapping of speech sounds in human auditory cortex. BMC Neurosci 5:24
Poeppel D, Yellin E, Phillips C, Roberts TP, Rowley HA, Wexler K, Marantz A (1996) Task-induced asymmetry of the auditory evoked M100 neuromagnetic field elicited by speech sounds. Brain Res/Cogn Brain Res 4:231–242
Schirmer A, Kotz SA (2006) Beyond the right hemisphere: brain mechanisms mediating vocal emotional processing. Trends Cogn Sci 10(1):24–30
Scott SK, Johnsrude IS (2003) The neuroanatomical and functional organization of speech perception. Trends Neurosci 26(2):100–107
Shannon RV, Zeng FG, Kamath V, Wygonski J, Ekelid M (1995) Speech recognition with primarily temporal cues. Science 270:303–304
Sivonen P, Maess B, Lattner S, Friederici AD (2006) Phonemic restoration in a sentence context: evidence from early and late ERP effects. Brain Res 1121:177–189
Steinschneider M, Dunn M (2002) Electrophysiology in developmental neuropsychology, Chap. 5. In: Segalowitz S, Rapin I (eds) Handbook of neuropsychology, 2 edn, vol 8, part 1. Elsevier, Amsterdam, pp 91–146
Strauß A, Kotz SA, Obleser J (2013) Narrowed expectancies under degraded speech: revisiting the N400. J Cogn Neurosci 25(8):1383–1395
Van Berkum JJ, Haggort P, Brown CM (1999) Semantic integration in sentences and discourse: evidence from the N400. J Cogn Neurosci 11(6):657–671
Van Petten C, Kutas M (1990) Interactions between sentence context and word frequency in event-related potentials. Mem Cognition 18(4):380–393
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2014 Springer Science+Business Media New York
About this entry
Cite this entry
Kotz, S.A. (2014). Electrophysiological Indices of Speech Processing. In: Jaeger, D., Jung, R. (eds) Encyclopedia of Computational Neuroscience. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7320-6_518-1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7320-6_518-1
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY
Online ISBN: 978-1-4614-7320-6
eBook Packages: Springer Reference Biomedicine and Life SciencesReference Module Biomedical and Life Sciences