Towards an analytical framework for investigating the neurophysiological influence of social context in speech perception

Social speaker context improves EEG prediction of word-level speech processing: socially congruent lexical expectations yield small but reliable gains versus incongruent contexts using identical acoustics and recordings.

• Why it matters: Neurophysiological studies struggle to separate social information from other factors during natural speech perception, limiting direct tests of how social context shapes lexical processing.
• What they did: The authors combine the fine-tuned LLM Mistral-Instruct with temporal response functions (TRFs) to compute lexical expectation measures, disentangling local context from speaker-specific social context and generating predictions for matching or mismatching speaker contexts.
• The result: Speaker-related social context contains information about speech register and conversational role beyond local context, and socially congruent expectations explain dissociable variance in neural responses, enabling isolation and measurement of social-context effects.

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