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Poster C68 in Poster Session C - Friday, August 9, 2024, 11:15 am – 1:15 pm, Johnson Ice Rink
The spatio-temporal dynamics of speech feature encoding in aging and aphasia
Jill Kries1 (), Pieter De Clercq2, Maaike Vandermosten2, Laura Gwilliams1; 1Stanford University, 2KU Leuven
During successful speech comprehension, phonetic features are encoded in a dynamic neural pattern that evolves over time. Here we tested whether individuals with comprehension difficulties exhibit altered neural dynamics of speech encoding. We recorded EEG responses from older adults and individuals with aphasia during natural story listening. We tested for how long phonetic features are decodable, their speed of evolution across neural populations, and which EEG sensors encode phonetic information, across groups. The analysis revealed that phonetic processing is robustly encoded in EEG responses of older adults. Individuals with aphasia were matched in speed of neural pattern evolution, but showed shorter (~50%) duration of phonetic encoding. Speech impairments in aphasia may therefore implicate failure to maintain lower-order information long enough to recognize lexical items.
Keywords: speech processing decoding EEG aphasia