RESEARCH ARTICLE Linguistic processing of task-irrelevant speech at a cocktail party Paz Har-shai Yahav*, Elana Zion Golumbic* The Gonda Center for Multidisciplinary Brain Research, Bar Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel Abstract Paying attention to one speaker in a noisy place can be extremely difficult, because to- be-attended and task-irrelevant speech compete for processing resources. We tested whether this competition is restricted to acoustic-phonetic interference or if it extends to competition for linguistic processing as well. Neural activity was recorded using Magnetoencephalography as human participants were instructed to attend to natural speech presented to one ear, and task- irrelevant stimuli were presented to the other. Task-irrelevant stimuli consisted either of random sequences of syllables, or syllables structured to form coherent sentences, using hierarchical frequency-tagging. We find that the phrasal structure of structured task-irrelevant stimuli was represented in the neural response in left inferior frontal and posterior parietal regions, indicating that selective attention does not fully eliminate linguistic processing of task-irrelevant speech. Additionally, neural tracking of to-be-attended speech in left inferior frontal regions was enhanced when competing with structured task-irrelevant stimuli, suggesting inherent competition between them for linguistic processing. Introduction *For correspondence: The seminal speech-shadowing experiments conducted in the 50 s and 60 s set the stage for study-
[email protected] (PH-Y); ing one of the primary cognitive challenges encountered in daily life: how do our perceptual and lin-
[email protected] (EZG) guistic systems deal effectively with competing speech inputs? (Cherry, 1953; Broadbent, 1958; Treisman, 1960).