A listening advantage for native speech is reflected by attention-related activity in auditory cortex [data]

We tested the hypothesis that attentional enhancement in auditory cortex is stronger for native speech using magnetoencephalography. Chinese and German speech stimuli were spoken by a bilingual speaker and combined into a two-stream, cocktail-party scene, with consistent and inconsistent language combinations.

A group of native speakers of Chinese and a group of native speakers of German performed a detection task in the cued target stream. Results showed that attention enhanced negative-going activity in the temporal response function deconvoluted from the speech envelope. This activity was stronger when the target was in native compared to non-native language, and for inconsistent compared to consistent language stimuli.