Speech rhythms and multiplexed oscillatory sensory coding in the human brain

Cortical oscillations are likely candidates for segmentation and coding of continuous speech. Here, we monitored continuous speech processing with magnetoencephalography (MEG) to unravel the principles of speech segmentation and coding. We demonstrate that speech entrains the phase of low-frequency (delta, theta) and the amplitude of high-frequency (gamma) oscillations in the auditory cortex. Phase entrainment is stronger in the right and amplitude entrainment is stronger in the left auditory cortex. Furthermore, edges in the speech envelope phase reset auditory cortex oscillations thereby enhancing their entrainment to speech. This mechanism adapts to the changing physical features of the speech envelope and enables efficient, stimulus-specific speech sampling. Finally, we show that within the auditory cortex, coupling between delta, theta, and gamma oscillations increases following speech edges. Importantly, all couplings (i.e., brain-speech and also within the cortex) attenuate for backward-presented speech, suggesting top-down control. We conclude that segmentation and coding of speech relies on a nested hierarchy of entrained cortical oscillations

Simultaneous measurement of forward-backward asymmetry and top polarization in dilepton final states from ttˉt\bar t production at the Tevatron

We present a simultaneous measurement of the forward-backward asymmetry and the top-quark polarization in $t\bar t$ production in dilepton final states using 9.7 fb$^{-1}$ of proton-antiproton collisions at $\sqrt{s}=1.96$ TeV with the D0 detector. To reconstruct the distributions of kinematic observables we employ a matrix element technique that calculates the likelihood of the possible $t\bar t$ kinematic configurations. After accounting for the presence of background events and for calibration effects, we obtain a forward-backward asymmetry of $A^{t\bar t} = (15.0 \pm 6.4 \text{ (stat)} \pm 4.9 \text{ (syst)})\%$ and a top-quark polarization times spin analyzing power in the beam basis of $\kappa P = (7.2 \pm 10.5 \text{ (stat)} \pm 4.2 \text{ (syst)})\%$, with a correlation of $-56\%$ between the measurements. If we constrain the forward-backward asymmetry to its expected standard model value, we obtain a measurement of the top polarization of $\kappa P = (11.3 \pm 9.1 \text{ (stat)} \pm 1.9 \text{ (syst)})\%.$ If we constrain the top polarization to its expected standard model value, we measure a forward-backward asymmetry of $A^{t\bar t} = (17.5 \pm 5.6 \text{ (stat)} \pm 3.1 \text{ (syst)})\%.$ A combination with the D0 $A^{t\bar t}$ measurement in the lepton+jets final state yields an asymmetry of $A^{t\bar t} = (11.8 \pm 2.5 \text{ (stat)} \pm 1.3 \text{ (syst)})\% .$ Within their respective uncertainties, all these results are consistent with the standard model expectations.Comment: 16 pages, 16 figures, published versio