θ-Band Cortical Tracking of the Speech Envelope Shows the Linear Phase Property

When listening to speech, low-frequency cortical activity tracks the speech envelope. It remains controversial, however, whether such envelope-tracking neural activity reflects entrainment of neural oscillations or superposition of transient responses evoked by sound features. Recently, it is suggested that the phase of envelope-tracking activity can potentially distinguish entrained oscillations and evoked responses. Here, we analyze the phase of envelope-tracking in humans during passive listening, and observe that the phase lag between cortical activity and speech envelope tends to change linearly across frequency in the θ band (4–8 Hz), suggesting that the θ-band envelope-tracking activity can be readily modeled by evoked responses.