Hitting the right pitch: Cortical tracking of fundamental frequency changes across speech rates in auditory and sensorimotor regions

Low-frequency neural oscillations contribute to the parsing of continuous speech into linguistic units. Little is known however on the coupling of brain rhythms to higher-frequencies in speech such as fundamental frequency (F0) or pitch. Using magnetoencephalography, we investigated whole-brain cortical tracking of F0 while participants listened to sentences produced at normal rate or fast rate, where pitch naturally increases, and to artificially accelerated sentences, where F0 remains unchanged. Our results revealed significant brain-to-F0 coupling across all speech rates not only in right auditory but also in right parietal, insular, and pre- and postcentral regions, likely including the ventral larynx area. Importantly, the cortico-acoustic coupling peak frequency was higher for natural fast speech to reflect the corresponding F0 increase compared to normal rate and time-compressed speech. These findings demonstrate the engagement of an auditory-somato-motor network in F0 tracking, supporting its role in facilitating phonemic processing during the perception of naturally-produced speech.