Intracranial EEG Processing of Auditory Feedback in Perisylvian Cortex

Poster Session D - Monday, April 15, 2024, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Sheraton Hall ABC

Garret Lynn Kurteff¹ (kurteff@utexas.edu), Elizabeth Tyler-Kabara¹, Dave Clarke¹, Howard Weiner^2,3, Anne Anderson^2,3, Andrew Watrous², Saman Asghar^1,2,3, Alyssa Field¹, Liberty Hamilton¹; ¹The University of Texas at Austin, ²Baylor College of Medicine, ³Texas Children's Hospital

Speaker-induced suppression, a feedback control mechanism, demonstrates that perceptual systems process auditory information differently during speaking and listening. During passive speech listening, the auditory cortex exhibits spatially separated “onset” responses at the start of a sentence and “sustained” responses throughout, but it is unclear how these might be modulated during speech production. Here we used stereotactic electroencephalography in sixteen patients with intractable epilepsy who read sentences aloud, then passively listened to playback to investigate the nature of these response profiles during speaking and playback. Unsupervised clustering of neural responses identified onset and sustained responses to speech in bilateral auditory cortex, with a selective suppression of onset responses during speech production. Other cortical areas were generally selective to speaking or listening but did not specifically suppress onset versus sustained responses. In ventral motor cortex, we observed electrodes involved in prearticulatory motor control. Finally, a “dual onset” cluster localized to posterior insula exhibited onset responses to both speaking and listening with similar latency to the “onset suppression” cluster identified in temporal cortex. “Onset suppression” and “dual onset” regions exhibited phonological feature tuning during temporal receptive field analysis, unlike other generally production/perception-selective areas. This study expands on previous identification of onset and sustained responses in temporal cortex to show that auditory onset responses are generally suppressed during speech production. We interpret this as a component of suppressive mechanisms during speech motor control. The insula exhibiting onset responses during speaking and listening suggests a role in multisensory integration during feedback control.

Topic Area: PERCEPTION & ACTION: Motor control