Introduction
The study of the neural bases of language comprehen-
sion relies on a range of techniques aimed at identify-
ing the impact of specific linguistic phenomena in the
brain signal. A substantial body of work has investi-
gated different levels of linguistic processing by linking
them to event-related potentials (ERPs) emerging at dis-
tinct time windows in the brain signal after word onset.
More recently, a complementary approach has been pro-
posed, known as the temporal response function (TRF),
which consists in predicting the brain signal from lin-
guistic predictors (Brodbeck et al., 2023; Crosse et al.,
2016; Ding & Simon, 2012).
The temporal response function framework enables
the fine-grained investigation of linguistic predictors, in-
dividually or jointly, by modeling the correspondence
between continuous linguistic signals and brain activity
over extended time scales. Using this approach, pre-
vious studies have demonstrated neural tracking of the
speech envelope (Brodbeck & Simon, 2020; Ding et al.,
2014) as well as of multiple linguistic predictors, includ-
ing phoneme and word onsets, lexical surprisal, and se-
mantic dissimilarity, highlighting the flexibility of TRFs
for probing different levels of language processing (Brod-
erick et al., 2018; Chalehchaleh et al., 2025; Gillis et al.,
2021; Heilbron et al., 2022; Weissbart et al., 2020).
However, most TRF studies rely on passive listening to
read speech under controlled EEG conditions, typically
using audiobook stimuli. In contrast, only a few studies
have examined natural conversational speech (Goldstein
et al., 2025; Silem et al., 2025; Zada et al., 2024), largely
due to the challenges of collecting and analyzing EEG
data in ecological settings where speech production and
movement introduce substantial noise.
In this study, we address the challenge of analyzing
the neural correlates of speech in natural settings by in-
vestigating whether findings from read speech generalize
to spontaneous speech. In the naturalistic setting, the
brain not only processes incoming speech but also plans
upcoming responses, engaging additional neural systems.
It is also harder to predict due to disfluencies and greater
variability in pacing/repairs. We hypothesize that prin-
cipal linguistic predictors contributing to neural tracking
are also active during spontaneous speech.
First, we introduce a processing pipeline that trains
models on single linguistic predictors and validate it on
an existing read-speech dataset (Bhattasali et al., 2020),
successfully replicating previously reported results. Sec-
ond, we apply the same pipeline to a corpus of sponta-
neous conversational speech (Boudin et al., 2023).
Our results confirm neural tracking of several lin-
guistic predictors, including word onset, part-of-speech
surprisal, and lexical surprisal in spontaneous speech
with robust effects in canonical linguistic time windows
around 200, 400, and 600 ms. To our knowledge, this
study provides the first evidence of linguistic neural
tracking in spontaneous speech and demonstrates the
feasibility of using EEG data collected in naturalistic
conversational settings
Related works
One major advantage of TRFs is their ability to capture
brain activity over extended time periods, representing
a substantial methodological advance for the analysis of
natural language. However, TRF studies have so far re-
lied almost exclusively on read speech (Broderick et al.,
2018; Chalehchaleh et al., 2025; Dou et al., 2025; Gillis
et al., 2021; Heilbron et al., 2022; Weissbart et al., 2020).
In the present study, we seek to advance our understand-
ing of the neural bases of language in ecological contexts
by focusing on spontaneous rather than read speech.
Predictor selection is a central issue in TRF studies.
Extensive prior work has highlighted the crucial role of
speech envelope tracking in neural responses (Brodbeck
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& Simon, 2020; Ding et al., 2014; Lalor & Foxe, 2010),
demonstrating effects of rhythmic structure and acoustic
onsets (Ding & Simon, 2014), as well as higher-level pre-
dictors such as phoneme onsets (Brodbeck et al., 2023;
Donhauser & Baillet, 2020). These predictors typically
elicit a negative deflection around 100 ms, sometimes fol-
lowed by a second negativity around 250 ms, resembling
the N250 or phonological mismatch negativity (Dou et
al., 2025; Gillis et al., 2021).
At higher linguistic levels, word-based predictors such
as word onset, surprisal, and semantic dissimilarity
evoke later and distinct neural responses depending on
their representational level. For instance, part-of-speech
(POS) surprisal has been linked to effects in the 200
– 500 ms time window (Heilbron et al., 2022). At the
lexical level, predictors including word onset, lexical sur-
prisal, and word frequency are typically associated with
responses around 400 ms, often interpreted as reflecting
an N400 component (Broderick et al., 2018; Dou et al.,
2025; Weissbart et al., 2020). Semantic-level predictors
have also been investigated, most notably semantic dis-
similarity (Broderick et al., 2018). These studies likewise
report N400-like effects, although such findings are not
always consistently replicated (Gillis et al., 2021).
Recent work has examined brain responses in terms
of both latency and duration, highlighting the distinct
temporal profiles of individual predictors — not only in
their predictive power (Dou et al., 2025), but also in
their position within the hierarchy of linguistic process-
ing (Gwilliams et al., 2025).
Methods
Data
We used two datasets, to contrast a more controlled,
passive listening scenario with a richer, more naturalistic
and dynamically interactive conversational setting.
The first corpus is the Alice dataset (Bhattasali et al.,
2020; J. R. Brennan, 2023), which includes EEG record-
ings from 49 participants listening to the opening chapter
of Alice in Wonderland (12.4 min; segmented into 12 tri-
als). The data was recorded using 61 electrodes at 500
Hz. Several participants had already been excluded by
the original authors due to experimental errors, unmet
behavioral criteria, or excessive noise, leaving 33 par-
ticipants for the analysis. We excluded four additional
participants because their first trial was missing.
For the second dataset, we used the SMYLE corpus
(Boudin et al., 2023), a French multimodal dataset com-
bining audio, video, and EEG recordings. It includes
30 dyads (16h) who first engage in storytelling and then
in free conversation. Storytelling consists of three tasks:
recounting a short video (the Pear Story (Chafe, 1981)),
pitching a movie, book, or video game, and describ-
ing a memorable vacation. Two listener conditions were
employed: attentive, in which listeners followed and re-
sponded naturally, and distracted, in which listeners se-
cretly counted words starting with /t /. For this study,
we selected 19 dyads after excluding dyads with exces-
sive noise and focused on the storytelling task, in which
one participant acts solely as listener to reduce EEG
noise. The corpus provides enriched orthographic tran-
scriptions (Blache et al., 2017), segmented into Inter-
Pausal Units (IPUs) and annotated for laughter, disflu-
encies, repetitions, truncated words, and elisions. Tran-
scriptions were normalized, tokenized, and time-aligned
with the speech signal using the SPPAS toolkit (Bigi,
2012). EEG data were recorded with two 64-channel
BioSemi systems (10 – 20 layout) at 2048 Hz.
EEG Pre-processing
EEG preprocessing was conducted using MNE-Python
1.10 (Gramfort, 2013). Alice dataset bad channels were
pre-marked by the authors (Bhattasali et al., 2020; J. R.
Brennan, 2023). For SMYLE participants, noisy or
artifact-ridden channels were marked as bad via visual
inspection of raw signals and power spectra. Participants
with>20% bad channels were excluded, resulting in two
Alice and four SMYLE participants removed. Signals
were referenced to the common average, band-pass fil-
tered (0.5 – 30 Hz, FIR), and bad channels interpolated
using spherical splines. To limit interpolation to <15%
(Crosse et al., 2021), three electrodes were excluded per
dataset, leaving 58 for Alice and 61 for SMYLE. EEG
signals were downsampled to 256 Hz. We investigated
broad band frequencies as well as frequencies from the
delta band. We included the delta band, since word-
related speech features naturally occur at 1–4 Hz, match-
ing the temporal dynamics of delta oscillations
For the SMYLE dataset, recorded during natural con-
versations, a semi-automatic artifact removal procedure
using ICA was applied. Signals were scaled to unit vari-
ance and whitened via PCA, then FastICA (Hyvarinen,
1999) extracted ICs according to the data rank. The
ICLabel method was used to inspect and classify ICs
as eye-blink, muscle, or cardiac artifacts (Li et al., 2022;
Pion-Tonachini et al., 2019). In parallel, a human inspec-
tor classified ICs by visually examining IC time-series,
topography and power spectrum. After excluding the
ICLabel- and human-identified noise ICs, the EEG sig-
nals were reconstructed using all of the remaining ICs.
Linguistic Features
We aim to investigate the neural correlates of a set of
linguistic features, including higher-level features such as
word and part-of-speech (POS) surprisal as well as low-
level features like word onset and the speech envelope.
Surprisal Estimation using LLMs. The word sur-
prisal and the POS surprisal were estimated using LLMs:
GPT-2 (Radford et al., 2019) for Alice and GPT-fr
(Simoulin & Crabb´ e, 2021) fine-tuned on French con-
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versation for SMYLE. We argue that English LLMs are
better equipped to model spoken English due to the sub-
stantially larger volume of available data and greater rep-
resentation of spoken language compared with French.
To address this gap, we fine-tuned the GPT-fr base
model on a SMYLE-derived conversational dataset with
LoRA applied to all layers, using transcriptions from
both the storytelling and free-conversation tasks with
all disfluencies preserved. The model was trained on
samples of 10 consecutive turns separated by the
marker. Training ran for five epochs with AdamW, us-
ing the following parameters: learning rate = 0.002, 500-
step warmup, batch size = 8, LoRA rank = 32, α= 32,
dropout ratio = 0.05, and gradient clipping at 1.
We passed the transcriptions (of the first Alice chapter
or the concatenated turns of the speaker for SMYLE)
through the LLM and obtained the logits for each word.
These were transformed into conditional probabilities for
each word by applying softmax and choosing the most
probable word. We obtain the word surprisal as follows:
surprisal(wi) =−log(P (wi|w1...wi−1))
For the POS surprisal, we followed to approach of Heil-
bron et al. (2022), i.e. top-k nucleus sampling with
k = 40 and p = 0.9. Specifically, the candidate set con-
sisted of the most probable tokens whose cumulative
probability reached 90%, with a minimum of the top
40 tokens always included. We restricted the maximum
k to be 300 to reduce computational costs. We then cal-
culated the POS tag using the Spacy library1 for each of
the top-k nucleus sampled tokens as well as the actual
target word. The POS surprisal is given by:
surprisalPOS(wi) =−log
(∑
t∈TP (wt|context)
∑
a∈AP(w a|context)
)
withTas the group of top-k nucleus sampled words hav-
ing the same POS tag as the target wordw i andAas
the group ofalltop-k nucleus sampled word. All words
were derived given the same context sequence as wi.
Constructing Continuous Feature Signals. With
our approach described above, we get discrete scores at
each word onset. Since TRFs work on signals, we need to
construct a continuous signal from these discrete values.
For this, we initiate a continuous time series, or rather an
array with the sampling rate of 256 Hz matching the du-
ration of the conversation, set to zero throughout. Spikes
scaled by the previously estimated surprisal value of the
corresponding word were inserted at word onset times
provided by the corpora. This yields a continuous sur-
prisal representation. This procedure was repeated for
the POS surprisal.
1https://spacy.io/ withfr core news lgfor French and
en core web lgfor English.
Because surprisal impulses occur at word boundaries,
we additionally modeled a word onset feature to disso-
ciate neural responses to linguistic information from re-
sponses driven purely by boundary timing. This control
regressor was generated using the same procedure, but
with impulses of amplitude 1 placed at each onset.
For the envelope, the amplitude envelope was ex-
tracted using the Hilbert transform implemented in the
Eelbrain toolbox (Brodbeck et al., 2023), and then re-
sampled to the target sampling rate of 256 Hz.
No normalization was applied to word onset since this
feature was binary encoded. As suggested in (Crosse et
al., 2021), the envelope was normalized by its standard
deviation to maintain positive values. Given that sur-
prisal and POS surprisal have identical timings as word
onset, the non-zero values of the two features were z-
score normalized.
TRF Modeling
Temporal response functions are widely used to study
the relationship between linguistic predictors and EEG
signal by modeling how an input predictor, when con-
volved with a response function, predicts brain activity.
In practice, models are trained separately for each par-
ticipant/dyad and feature, estimating time-lagged pa-
rameters that capture how predictors contribute to the
EEG signal at different latencies. Both, feature and neu-
ral signal were normalized before training (except for
word onset). Model performance is then evaluated by
comparing the predicted EEG signal with the observed
data across electrodes.
The estimated parameters, or weights, indicate how
variations in the stimulus relate to EEG signals, reflect-
ing the strength of coupling between the linguistic input
and the neural response. When this coupling is strong,
it is informative to examine whether its temporal profile
corresponds to known ERP components. For instance,
a strong coupling between lexical surprisal and EEG ac-
tivity around 400 ms after stimulus onset may be inter-
preted as reflecting an N400-like effect.
In our study, the temporal lag range was defined from
-200 ms to 800 ms, yielding 256 discrete time points
given a sampling rate of 256 Hz. TRF weights were com-
puted by minimizing the mean squared error between the
recorded EEG signal and its model-based prediction. To
reduce the risk of overfitting, for each dyad/participant,
the EEG signals and the corresponding features were
split into training and testing sets. For each partici-
pant in the Alice dataset, the first 10 trials (83% of the
data) were used for training, the last two trials were
reserved for testing. For each dyad in the SMYLE cor-
pus, the initial 90% of the data was used for training
and the remaining 10% was reserved for testing. TRF
models were fitted separately on the training set of each
dyad/participant using ridge regression, with parame-
terλbeing optimized via 5-fold cross-validation, dur-
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(a) Broadband
Alice
SMYLE
(b) Deltaband
Alice
SMYLE
Figure 1: Spatiotemporal clusters were identified using a permutation-based approach for the envelope. Left: Scalp topog-
raphy of the T-map averaged across significant post-stimulus time window. Electrodes belonging to significant clusters are
marked by white circles, with the color scale indicating the magnitude of the statistics. Right: Averaged time-course of the
envelope responses. The blue shaded region indicates the significant time window corresponding to the topographic map.
Table 1: Overall prediction accuracy (mean Pearson’s r) of
TRF models for each feature for either broad (0.5 − 30 Hz)
or delta (0.5 −4 Hz) bands.
EEG Band Feature Pearson’s r
(Alice)
Pearson’s r
(SMYLE)
Broad
Envelope 0.0395 0.0198
Word Onset 0.0486 0.0164
POS Surprisal 0.0131 -0.0032
Surprisal 0.0017 -0.0018
Delta
Envelope 0.0539 0.0252
Word Onset 0.0663 0.0235
POS Surprisal 0.0223 -0.0050
Surprisal 0.0072 0.0011
ing which 100 candidate values logarithmically spaced
between 10−4and 10 12 were evaluated. Model perfor-
mance was quantified on the test set using the Pearson
correlation coefficient of the predicted and observed EEG
signals.
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