Below please find information in regards to Psychology (Behavioral and Cognitive Neuroscience) PhD student lvan Iotzov’s second exam (defense of research proposal), which is open to all and will take place on Tuesday, May 25th at 11:00am via Zoom (email iiotzov@gradcenter.cuny.edu for Zoom ID). Ivan's abstract is also below.

Neural Speech Tracking: Mechanisms and Practical Applications

Speech signals have a strong and consistent effect on brain activity. Many previous studies have demonstrated the ability to find correlations between the amplitude envelope of ongoing speech and evoked responses measured through EEG or MEG. This correlation appears to be modulated by attention, as well as other high-level factors. It is of particular interest because of the possible practical applications of speech tracking in the steering of hearing aid devices and other assistive hearing devices. These devices are typically difficult to tune and the ability to use an objective neural signal as the basis for their tuning would be a great advancement in comfort and efficacy for their users. In this proposal, investigate the correlation between speech intelligibility and the neural tracking of a speech segment. We show a link between the neural tracking of speech and performance on a behavioral word-recognition task. We also develop a novel behavioral paradigm for the investigation of these effects and show preliminary data demonstrating the validity of this new paradigm. Additionally, we propose further experiments to illuminate the mechanisms behind this speech tracking phenomenon using novel manipulations of speech stimuli. Together, these aims and methods provide a basis for the use of speech tracking as an objective neural measure of intelligibility of speech and look to shed light on the oscillatory mechanisms that create the speech tracking phenomenon.