Effect of Task and Attention on Neural Tracking of Speech

EEG-based measures of neural tracking of natural running speech are becoming increasingly popular to investigate neural processing of speech and have applications in audiology. When the stimulus is a single speaker, it is usually assumed that the listener actively attends to and understands the stimulus. However, as the level of attention of the listener is inherently variable, we investigated how this affected neural envelope tracking. Using a movie as a distractor, we varied the level of attention while we estimated neural envelope tracking. We varied the intelligibility level by adding stationary noise. We found a significant difference in neural envelope tracking between the condition with maximal attention and the movie condition. This difference was most pronounced in the right-frontal region of the brain. The degree of neural envelope tracking was highly correlated with the stimulus signal-to-noise ratio, even in the movie condition. This could be due to residual neural resources to passively attend to the stimulus. When envelope tracking is used to measure speech understanding objectively, this means that the procedure can be made more enjoyable and feasible by letting participants watch a movie during stimulus presentation.