Introducing MEG-MASC a high-quality magneto-encephalography dataset for evaluating natural speech processing

Abstract The “MEG-MASC” dataset provides a curated set of raw magnetoencephalography (MEG) recordings of 27 English speakers who listened to two hours of naturalistic stories. Each participant performed two identical sessions, involving listening to four fictional stories from the Manually Annotated...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Laura Gwilliams, Graham Flick, Alec Marantz, Liina Pylkkänen, David Poeppel, Jean-Rémi King
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Nature Portfolio 2023-12-01
Series:Scientific Data
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-023-02752-5
Description
Summary:Abstract The “MEG-MASC” dataset provides a curated set of raw magnetoencephalography (MEG) recordings of 27 English speakers who listened to two hours of naturalistic stories. Each participant performed two identical sessions, involving listening to four fictional stories from the Manually Annotated Sub-Corpus (MASC) intermixed with random word lists and comprehension questions. We time-stamp the onset and offset of each word and phoneme in the metadata of the recording, and organize the dataset according to the ‘Brain Imaging Data Structure’ (BIDS). This data collection provides a suitable benchmark to large-scale encoding and decoding analyses of temporally-resolved brain responses to speech. We provide the Python code to replicate several validations analyses of the MEG evoked responses such as the temporal decoding of phonetic features and word frequency. All code and MEG, audio and text data are publicly available to keep with best practices in transparent and reproducible research.
ISSN:2052-4463