Characterization of Speech Imagery in Scalp EEG and Comparison with Motor Imagery

Abstract

Speech imagery is an attractive brain-computer interface paradigm for communication because it is endogenous and intrinsically linguistic. Yet despite growing interest, its dominant scalp-EEG spatiotemporal characteristics remain poorly characterized. We investigated whether speech imagery, understood here as the motor imagery of articulatory movements, exhibits the motor-related mu/alpha and beta desynchronization expected from motor imagery. In $34$ participants, we compared speech imagery, finger motor imagery, and explicitly cued no-task trials recorded under the same trial structure, analyzing band-power dynamics across channels and time. Finger motor imagery showed the expected contralateral mu/alpha and beta desynchronization over sensorimotor areas, whereas speech imagery showed a weaker, more distributed increase in alpha power relative to no-task. A classifier discriminating imagery from no-task reached mean balanced accuracies of $0.563\pm 0.071$ for speech imagery and $0.717\pm 0.125$ for motor imagery, with band-ablation analyses showing larger, more robust alpha and beta effects for motor imagery. These results show that the dominant group-level scalp response to speech imagery did not resemble the canonical alpha/beta desynchronization associated with motor imagery.