It remains unclear whether the process of speech tracking, which facilitates speech segmentation, reflects top-down mechanisms related to prior linguistic models or stimulus-driven mechanisms, or possibly both. To address this, we recorded electroencephalography (EEG) responses from native and non-native speakers of English that had different prior experience with the English language but heard acoustically identical stimuli. Despite a significant difference in the ability to segment and perceive speech, our EEG results showed that theta-band tracking of the speech envelope did not depend significantly on prior experience with language. However, tracking in the theta-band did show changes across repetitions of the same sentence, suggesting a priming effect. Furthermore, native and non-native speakers showed different phase dynamics at word boundaries, suggesting differences in segmentation mechanisms. Finally, we found that the correlation between higher frequency dynamics reflecting phoneme-level processing and perceptual segmentation of words might depend on prior experience with the spoken language.

目前尚不清楚促进语音分割的语音跟踪过程是否反映了与先前语言模型或刺激驱动机制相关的自上而下的机制，或者可能两者兼而有之。为了解决这个问题，我们记录了母语为英语和非母语为英语的人的脑电图 (EEG) 反应，这些人对英语有不同的先前经验，但听到了相同的声学刺激。尽管分割和感知语音的能力存在显着差异，但我们的 EEG 结果表明，语音包络的 theta 波段跟踪并不显着依赖于先前的语言经验。然而，在 theta 波段中的跟踪确实显示了相同句子重复之间的变化，这表明存在启动效应。此外，母语者和非母语者在词边界处表现出不同的相位动态，表明分割机制存在差异。最后，我们发现反映音素级处理的高频动态与词的感知分割之间的相关性可能取决于先前的口语经验。