Top-down modulation of acoustic entrainment at syllabic and phonemic scales

Determine whether and how higher-level linguistic processing modulates acoustic entrainment at the syllabic and phonemic scales during speech comprehension, beyond effects attributable to acoustic differences.

Background

Slow envelope fluctuations in speech are thought to drive theta-range entrainment for syllabic segmentation, with proposed top-down modulation by linguistic context. However, evidence is mixed and sometimes confounded by acoustic differences across conditions.

Clarifying the presence and mechanisms of top-down influence on acoustic entrainment is essential to integrate oscillatory models with hierarchical language processing.