Language Circle: Giovanni Di Liberto

Giovanni Di Liberto
Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland

Investigating auditory cognition with natural speech and music

Perception involves making sense of the world around us by processing a continuous flow of sensory information. In doing so, the human brain produces electrical activity that synchronises to particular properties of sensory inputs, a phenomenon referred to as neural tracking. The case of auditory perception is particularly remarkable. The discovery that neural signals reliably track the amplitude envelope of continuous sounds has led to new research directions, such as the study of auditory attention in immersive multi-talker scenarios. Here, I will present a series of studies investigating the neural tracking phenomenon when listening to speech and music, wherein both low-level acoustic properties and more abstract linguistic structures have to be processed. I will demonstrate methodologies for disentangling neural responses to stimulus properties at different abstraction levels from a single electroencephalography (EEG) recording. I will then describe recent developments where the resulting objective indices are used for probing auditory perception across various contexts, such as language learning and developmental research.

This talk was held on November 13th, 2024 on zoom for the Language Circle, a colloquium, organised by the Language Cycles Research group of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany.