Decoding Covert Speech from EEG Using a Functional Areas Spatio-Temporal Transformer

Muyun Jiang; Yi Ding; Wei Zhang; Kok Ann Colin Teo; LaiGuan Fong; Shuailei Zhang; Zhiwei Guo; Chenyu Liu; Raghavan Bhuvanakantham; Wei Khang Jeremy Sim; Chuan Huat Vince Foo; Rong Hui Jonathan Chua; Parasuraman Padmanabhan; Victoria Leong; Jia Lu; Balazs Gulyas; Cuntai Guan

arXiv · 2504.03762

Decoding Covert Speech from EEG Using a Functional Areas Spatio-Temporal Transformer

Muyun Jiang·Yi Ding·Wei Zhang·Kok Ann Colin Teo·LaiGuan Fong·Shuailei Zhang·Zhiwei Guo·Chenyu Liu·Raghavan Bhuvanakantham·Wei Khang Jeremy Sim·Chuan Huat Vince Foo·Rong Hui Jonathan Chua·Parasuraman Padmanabhan·Victoria Leong·Jia Lu·Balazs Gulyas·Cuntai Guan

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Abstract

Covert speech involves imagining speaking without audible sound or any movements. Decoding covert speech from electroencephalogram (EEG) is challenging due to a limited understanding of neural pronunciation mapping and the low signal-to-noise ratio of the signal. In this study, we developed a large-scale multi-utterance speech EEG dataset from 57 right-handed native English-speaking subjects, each performing covert and overt speech tasks by repeating the same word in five utterances within a ten-second duration. Given the spatio-temporal nature of the neural activation process during speech pronunciation, we developed a Functional Areas Spatio-temporal Transformer (FAST), an effective framework for converting EEG signals into tokens and utilizing transformer architecture for sequence encoding. Our results reveal distinct and interpretable speech neural features by the visualization of FAST-generated activation maps across frontal and temporal brain regions with each word being covertly spoken, providing new insights into the discriminative features of the neural representation of covert speech. This is the first report of such a study, which provides interpretable evidence for speech decoding from EEG. The code for this work has been made public at https://github.com/Jiang-Muyun/FAST

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Muyun Jiang, Yi Ding, Wei Zhang, Kok Ann Colin Teo, LaiGuan Fong, Shuailei Zhang, Zhiwei Guo, Chenyu Liu, Raghavan Bhuvanakantham, Wei Khang Jeremy Sim, Chuan Huat Vince Foo, Rong Hui Jonathan Chua, Parasuraman Padmanabhan, Victoria Leong, Jia Lu, Balazs Gulyas, Cuntai Guan. 2025-04-02. Decoding Covert Speech from EEG Using a Functional Areas Spatio-Temporal Transformer. https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.03762

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