An integrative view on attentional modulation in naturalistic speech

Attending to a speaker is a complex process: to hear sound waves that represent acoustic features; to understand the meaning of words that represent semantic features; and the listener and speaker need to be aligned to form a common ground, which represents inter-brain features. Little is known about how attention modulates these features from the speaker in an integrative way. Adopting naturalistic speech, combing with natural language processing models and inter-brain EEG analysis methods, we measured how listener responses to different information from the attended speaker simultaneously. Our result reveals that: the sound is the first to be processed; the meaning of the attended speech is parsed after that. The listener’s mind aligned to the speaker even seconds before the speech begins. Together, our results illustrated how our brain is selectively entrained to different types of information from the speaker in an integrative view.