ecologically valid natural story listening. This combines the sensitivity to subcortical responses (EEG) with the superior specificity for cortical responses (MEG), allowing to study and interrelate these responses in the same participants for the first time.

The study will first test whether deep subcortical signals are detectable by MEG alone and thereby contribute to a longstanding and increasingly controversial fundamental question. Irrespective of the outcome, the core goal is to then use models of the subcortical activity as a biologically plausible “front end” to build a new, superior benchmark model of cortical processing. This end-to-end model, refined with deep learning, will map the acoustic waveform to cortical activity via the subcortical stage. The outcome will be a central new tool for the field, providing a more rigorous, acoustically grounded yardstick to test theories of neuronal language comprehension

ecologically valid natural story listening. This combines the sensitivity to subcortical responses (EEG) with the superior specificity for cortical responses (MEG), allowing to study and interrelate these responses in the same participants for the first time.

The study will first test whether deep subcortical signals are detectable by MEG alone and thereby contribute to a longstanding and increasingly controversial fundamental question. Irrespective of the outcome, the core goal is to then use models of the subcortical activity as a biologically plausible “front end” to build a new, superior benchmark model of cortical processing. This end-to-end model, refined with deep learning, will map the acoustic waveform to cortical activity via the subcortical stage. The outcome will be a central new tool for the field, providing a more rigorous, acoustically grounded yardstick to test theories of neuronal language comprehension