Early visual cortex tracks speech envelope in the absence of visual input

Neural entrainment to continuous speech is typically observed within the language network and can be modulated by both low-level acoustic features and high-level meaningful linguistic units (e.g., phonemes, phrases, and sentences). Recent evidence showed that visual cortex may entrain to speech envelope, however its putative role in the hierarchy of speech processing remains unknown. We tested blindfolded participants who listened to semantically meaningful or meaningless stories, either in quiet or embedded in multi-talker babble noise. Entrainment to speech was assessed with forward linear modeling of participants EEG activity. We investigated (1) low-level acoustic effects by contrasting neural tracking of speech presented in quiet or noise and (2) high-level linguistic effects by contrasting neural tracking to meaningful or meaningless stories. Results showed that envelope tracking was enhanced and delayed for speech embedded in noise compared to quiet. When semantic information was missing, entrainment to speech envelope was fastened and reduced. Source modeling revealed that envelope tracking engaged wide neural networks beyond the auditory cortex, including early visual cortex. Surprisingly, while no clear influence of semantic content was found, the magnitude of visual cortex entrainment was affected by low-level features. The decrease of sound SNR-level dampened visual cortex tracking, suggesting an active suppressing mechanism in challenging listening conditions. Altogether, these findings provide further evidence of a functional role of early visual cortex in the entrainment to continuous speech.