TY - JOUR T1 - Electroencephalographic Signatures of the Neural Representation of Speech during Selective Attention JF - eneuro JO - eNeuro DO - 10.1523/ENEURO.0057-19.2019 VL - 6 IS - 5 SP - ENEURO.0057-19.2019 AU - Vibha Viswanathan AU - Hari M. Bharadwaj AU - Barbara G. Shinn-Cunningham Y1 - 2019/09/01 UR - http://www.eneuro.org/content/6/5/ENEURO.0057-19.2019.abstract N2 - The ability to selectively attend to speech in the presence of other competing talkers is critical for everyday communication; yet the neural mechanisms facilitating this process are poorly understood. Here, we use electroencephalography (EEG) to study how a mixture of two speech streams is represented in the brain as subjects attend to one stream or the other. To characterize the speech-EEG relationships and how they are modulated by attention, we estimate the statistical association between each canonical EEG frequency band (delta, theta, alpha, beta, low-gamma, and high-gamma) and the envelope of each of ten different frequency bands in the input speech. Consistent with previous literature, we find that low-frequency (delta and theta) bands show greater speech-EEG coherence when the speech stream is attended compared to when it is ignored. We also find that the envelope of the low-gamma band shows a similar attention effect, a result not previously reported with EEG. This is consistent with the prevailing theory that neural dynamics in the gamma range are important for attention-dependent routing of information in cortical circuits. In addition, we also find that the greatest attention-dependent increases in speech-EEG coherence are seen in the mid-frequency acoustic bands (0.5–3 kHz) of input speech and the temporal-parietal EEG sensors. Finally, we find individual differences in the following: (1) the specific set of speech-EEG associations that are the strongest, (2) the EEG and speech features that are the most informative about attentional focus, and (3) the overall magnitude of attentional enhancement of speech-EEG coherence. ER -