CuttingEEG2021 Edmund Lalor. Encoding and Decoding Models of EEG Responses to Natural Speech.

Speech is central to human life. But how the human brain extracts meaning from the dynamic patterns of sound that constitute speech remains poorly understood. This is especially true for natural, continuous speech, which requires us to efficiently parse and process speech in the context of our ongoing conversation and often in the presence of competing sounds. In this talk, I will outline efforts over the last few years to use encoding and decoding models to derive interpretable EEG indices of natural speech processing. I will discuss how these modelling frameworks can be used to test hypotheses about the hierarchical processing of natural speech, and about how processing at different hierarchical levels is affected by attention, visual input, and context-based predictions.