In three ds004703 sEEG subjects, held-out 70–150 Hz tracking favored English in two, but the group test was not significant

This study tested whether high-frequency activity (HFA, 70–150 Hz) tracked the speech envelope more strongly for comprehended English than foreign Catalan at bipolar sEEG pairs selected on independent English passages. In OpenNeuro ds004703 v1.1.0, the best pair was selected on English passages 1–2 and evaluated on held-out English passages 3–4 and up to four Catalan passages. Across three subjects, English-minus-Catalan differences were +0.173, −0.007, and +0.094 (mean +0.087); two of three were positive. The one-sided exact sign-flip test was not significant (p = 0.25; with three subjects the minimum possible p was 0.125). For the top five pairs, all three differences were positive (mean +0.090; p = 0.125). Circular-shift null correction changed differences by less than 0.005. Catalan tracking remained strong for SD012 (r = 0.219), so the observed English advantage was relative, not all-or-none. The evidence is limited by three subjects, two held-out English passages per session, and confounding of language with speaker, acoustics, passage duration, and time in session. The dataset's Catalan wavs in stimuli/excerpts/Block N/ are 3.44 s placeholders; the full passages used for the Catalan analysis are in stimuli/excerpts/catalan_v2/.

stereo-EEG · speech envelope · high-frequency activity · language comprehension · English · Catalan · OpenNeuro · exact sign-flip test