Estimating the Explainable Variance of EEG Responses to Natural Speech

Abstract Substantial progress has been made in recent years on understanding how the human brain parses and processes natural speech. Much of this progress has been based on modeling how brain activity relates to the different acoustic and linguistic features of speech. By fitting and testing models based on those features, one can test hypotheses about the kinds of computations and representations the brain uses to convert speech sounds into understanding. While much of this work has focused on modeling BOLD activity using functional neuroimaging or intracranially recorded electrophysiological signals, the approach has also proven useful with MEG and EEG. Indeed, noninvasive EEG has certain advantages for studying speech processing in terms of translational research and application. Research over the last decade or so has shown that EEG can be successfully modeled based on numerous acoustic, linguistic, and paralinguistic speech features. However, an important unanswered question hangs over all of this work: namely, what constitutes a good model of EEG responses to natural speech? Or, to put it another way, how much variance in EEG recorded during natural speech listening is explainable as having derived from that speech input? The present study aims to tackle this issue. We do so under the assumption that the best model for a person’s EEG response to natural speech is a set of EEG responses from other people listening to the same speech. Using this assumption, we construct inter-subject models using EEG from 19 healthy adult native speakers of English who all listened to the same audiobook. The model for each subject involves predicting their EEG data using (dimensionality-reduced) EEG from different numbers of other subjects and then extrapolating to estimate the total explainable variance in the target individual’s response to speech. Following this, we show that linear models (temporal response functions) based on several commonly used acoustic and linguistic speech features can predict most – but importantly not all – of the estimated total explainable variance in EEG responses across subjects.