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Neural Signatures of Event Segmentation During Narrative Listening in Background Noise

Poster Session C - Sunday, March 8, 2026, 5:00 – 7:00 pm PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballroom

Ryan Panela^1,2 (), Aysha Motala³, Ingrid Johnsrude^4,5, Björn Herrmann^1,2; ¹Rotman Research Institute, Baycrest Academy for Research and Education, ²Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, ³Department of Psychology, University of Stirling, ⁴Department of Psychology, University of Western Ontario, ⁵School of Communication Sciences & Disorders, University of Western Ontario

Investigations into speech-comprehension difficulties often involve intelligibility of short, disconnected sentences, limiting generalization to real-life listening. Novel approaches to understanding naturalistic speech listening are critical for insight into impaired processing. Recent memory research has demonstrated that humans naturally perceive, encode, and recall continuous experiences as temporally extended discrete events, a process known as event segmentation. This phenomenon, driven by attention, helps predict upcoming information and recall experiences; however, few studies have leveraged this framework to understand challenges in speech comprehension. In the current study, participants (N=40, 17–24 years) listened to three spoken stories from The Moth podcast during fMRI scanning. Stories were overlaid with a twelve-talker babble in five conditions, ranging from easy to difficult intelligibility (clear, +14, +9, +4, –1 dB SNR). Event boundaries were identified in story transcripts using large language models and temporally aligned to the audio. BOLD responses were time-locked to event boundaries and compared to event centres. Event boundaries elicited widespread transient increases in activity across frontoparietal, attention, default-mode, somatomotor, and visual networks, peaking approximately five seconds post-boundary. Activation at boundaries exceeded event centres, confirming that listeners parsed narratives into meaningful events. Although high-clarity speech engaged a broader set of regions than low-clarity speech, overall response magnitude did not differ. Subtle right-temporal deactivations may suggest anticipatory processing preceding boundaries. These findings indicate neural signatures of event segmentation persist despite moderate background noise. Even when intelligibility declines, listeners maintain coherent mental models, organized around events, highlighting event segmentation as a stable cognitive mechanism supporting real-world comprehension.

Topic Area: ATTENTION: Auditory