Effects of Transient Levels of Speech on Auditory Attention Decoding Performance in a Two‐Speaker Paradigm

Abstract

Stimulus reconstruction decodes the listener's auditory attention through the greater neural tracking of the attended speech over the unattended stream. While acoustic features of speech are vital to the listening task and comprehension, very few studies have analyzed the effects of acoustic features of speech on stimulus reconstruction. This paper investigates approaches of stimulus reconstruction, where correlations between the neurally decoded and actual speech envelopes are calculated from specific speech segments, varying in transient levels as measured by spectral transition measures. Additionally, two methods of calculating correlations were adopted enabling analysis of the effects of relatively lower and higher frequency components of the speech envelope. Correlation after concatenation analysis showed that STM level of only the attended speech affected decoding performance, hinting at a top‐down attentional effect. A bottom‐up effect of salient aspects of speech momentarily dominating neural entrainment was also inferred from the weighted mean of multiple correlations. Future studies on the link between acoustic features of speech and its corresponding neural tracking behavior are suggested. © 2023 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan. Published by Wiley Periodicals LLC.