Comparison of Acoustic and Syllable Neural Tracking of Natural Speech and Syllable Sequences in Children

Neural tracking is the ability of the cerebral cortex to track changes in various components of stimuli. In our study, we examine the features of neural tracking of acoustic characteristics and features of syllable processing under conditions of listening to natural speech and syllable sequences in children aged 3 to 9 years. During the experimental tasks, an electroencephalogram was recorded, which was then analyzed using temporal response function. The results show that processing of the acoustic component of the stimuli (speech envelope) begins earlier for natural speech than for sequences of meaningless syllables. In the case of syllables onset processing, the results demonstrate the involvement of different cortical areas for the two conditions, as well as a different structure of temporal response function. The findings are discussed in view of differences in top-down mechanisms for processing speech information with and without semantic content.