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Language and Cognition

Language and Cognition

Language serves as a bridge between ideas and communication, influencing how individuals perceive and interact with the world. Psychologists have long debated whether language shapes thought or vice versa. This discussion gained grip with Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf in the 1940s, who proposed that language determines thought, a concept known as linguistic determinism. They suggested that the vocabulary and structure of a language influence how its speakers think and perceive reality.

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Attentional Engagement with Target and Distractor Streams Predicts Speech Comprehension in Multitalker Environments.

Alice Vivien Barchet^1,2,3, Andrea Bruera⁴, Jasmin Wend⁴

¹Research Group Cognition and Plasticity, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig 04103, Germany barchet@cbs.mpg.de.

The Journal of Neuroscience : the Official Journal of the Society for Neuroscience

|October 24, 2025

Summary

Attentional filtering in speech comprehension involves enhancing attended speech and suppressing ignored speech at different brain processing levels. This study reveals how neural tracking of acoustic and linguistic features supports selective listening and understanding complex auditory environments.

Keywords:

EEG selective attention speech temporal response functions

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Area of Science:

Neuroscience
Cognitive Science
Auditory Perception

Background:

Attention is crucial for speech comprehension amidst competing sounds.
Neural representations of attended speech are typically stronger than unattended speech.
The hierarchical mechanisms of attentional filtering (enhancement vs. suppression) remain unclear.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate how neural tracking of acoustic and linguistic features supports speech comprehension.
To determine the roles of target enhancement and distractor suppression in attentional filtering.
To examine these processes at different hierarchical levels of speech processing.

Main Methods:

Analysis of electroencephalography (EEG) signals from 43 young adults.
Utilized multivariate temporal response functions to analyze neural tracking.
Correlated neural tracking of speech features with single-trial speech comprehension measures.

Main Results:

Neural tracking of word/phoneme onsets and linguistic features in attended speech predicted comprehension.
Acoustic tracking of ignored speech positively correlated with comprehension.
Linguistic neural tracking of ignored speech negatively correlated with comprehension.

Conclusions:

Attentional filtering requires both enhancement of the target speech and suppression of the distractor speech.
These complementary processes operate at different hierarchical levels (acoustic vs. linguistic).
Understanding these neural dynamics is key to explaining selective listening and speech comprehension.