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Differentiating endogenous and entrained delta-band rhythms in the brain: a naturalistic story-listening experiment

Poster Session E - Monday, March 31, 2025, 2:30 – 4:30 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Leonardo zeine^1,2 (leonardo.zeine@gmail.com), David Peoppel³; ¹Ernst Strüngmann Institute for Neuroscience, ²Max Planck School of Cognition, ³New York University

Spoken language, unlike written text, is a continuous and overlapping signal that lacks explicit cues for segmentation. In this study, we investigate the role of neural delta-band oscillations (<4 Hz) in segmenting linguistic information at the phrasal level. Magnetoencephalography (MEG) data were collected from 10 native English speakers as they listened to four stories from the NYU-BU Contextually Controlled Stories Corpus (NUBUC) in two conditions: (1) a fluent, unedited version and (2) a version with artificially removed pauses. Segments longer than 150 ms with an average amplitude below 0.15% of the normalized amplitude were identified and extracted in the no-pause condition. Using a temporal response function (TRF) approach, we could disentangle neural activity in the delta range, such as responses to sentence onsets, from activity that naturally correlates with slow fluctuations in the audio signal, caused by pauses. In the no-pause condition, relative pitch processing was enhanced in the right superior temporal gyrus, while predictive processes, modeled by entropy and surprise regressors, were globally suppressed. These findings suggest a compensatory reorganization within the language network to adapt to the absence of pauses and maintain comprehension, as well as an interaction between syntactic and prosodic representations during naturalistic language processing.

Topic Area: LANGUAGE: Syntax