Back

Very Early Cortical Auditory Responses to Speech in Humans

Lerud, K. D.; Fisher, C. D.; Commuri, V.; Anderson, S.; Simon, J. Z.

2026-06-05 neuroscience
10.64898/2026.06.04.730183 bioRxiv
Show abstract

A foundational measure of the auditory systems ability to process sound correctly is the auditory brainstem response (ABR) and middle latency response (MLR) complex, but how they vary with stimulus complexity and behavioral relevance is not well understood. To address these issues, we recorded noninvasive electromagnetic temporal response functions (TRFs) in healthy, young adults listening to both clicks and naturalistic speech. Through a source analysis of the responses, we found that the TRFs ABR-MLR complex for speech listening contains a very early cortical peak (11 ms latency) which has not been previously well-characterized, and which is not present in the TRFs ABR-MLR complex for click stimuli. Several other significant diderences in latency and source between the speech and click MLR complexes were found, enriching our understanding of the human auditory systems behavior for diverse stimulus types. In this way, the use of naturalistic speech coupled with the TRF framework reveals how auditory responses reflect the ethological relevance of speech at even short time scales.

Matching journals

The top 3 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.