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Anatomical auditory–motor white-matter connectivity underlies individual differences in cortical speech tracking
Poster Session D, Thursday, October 1, 4:30 - 6:30 pm, Wangari Maathai
This poster is part of the Sandbox Series.
Basil Preisig1, Johanna Rimmele2; 1University of Zurich, 2Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Frankfurt
Auditory–motor connections are crucial for speech production and have been increasingly implicated in speech comprehension, yet whether variation in their structural integrity accounts for interindividual differences in neural speech tracking remains unclear. To address this question, we combined MEG-based neural speech tracking with diffusion-weighted imaging from a large open-access dataset of neurotypical individuals. Neural speech tracking was quantified using multivariate Gaussian copula mutual information. MEG time series were extracted for several auditory and speech motor regions of interest. Tracking in the delta band (1–3 Hz) was strongest in the ventral motor cortex and showed greater interindividual variability than in classic language regions, including the superior temporal gyrus and inferior frontal gyrus. Strikingly, this variability was predicted by the total volume of the left arcuate fasciculus, a major auditory–motor white-matter pathway. These findings provide initial evidence that auditory–motor connectivity underlies interindividual variability in neural speech tracking within motor regions.
Topic Areas: Speech Perception,