Kaja Rosa Benz

Introduction replying to O. Abdoun et al. Nature Communications https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-73568-1 (2026) Reanalyzing open data from our previous work1. Abdoun et al. argue that there is no evidence for anticipatory preactivation of sound frequency-specific information in predictable tone sequences.

Results We investigated whether ocular tracking of unheard speech exists in hearing subjects using coherence. Therefore, we compared speech tracking in a forward versus backward condition (Fig. 1A). Subsequently, we examined the relationship of ocular speech tracking to neural speech tracking using partial coherence.

Abstract Behavioral and neuroscientific studies have shown that watching a speaker's lip movements aids speech comprehension. Intriguingly, even when videos of speakers are presented silently, various cortical regions track auditory features, such as the envelope. Recently, we demonstrated that eye movements track low-level acoustic information when attentively listening to speech.