Decoding Chinese phonemes from intracortical brain signals with hyperbolic-space neural representations

Speech brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), which translate brain signals into spoken words or sentences, have shown significant potential for high-performance BCI communication. Phonemes are the fundamental units of pronunciation in most languages. While existing speech BCIs have largely focused on English, where words contain diverse compositions of phonemes, Chinese Mandarin is a monosyllabic language, with words typically consisting of a consonant and a vowel. This feature makes it feasible to develop high-performance Mandarin speech BCIs by decoding phonemes directly from neural signals. This study aimed to decode spoken Mandarin phonemes using intracortical neural signals. We observed that phonemes with similar pronunciations were often represented by inseparable neural patterns, leading to confusion in phoneme decoding. This finding suggests that the neural representation of spoken phonemes has a hierarchical structure. To account for this, we proposed learning the neural representation of phoneme pronunciation in a hyperbolic space, where the hierarchical structure could be more naturally optimized. Experiments with intracortical neural signals from a Chinese participant showed that the proposed model learned discriminative and interpretable hierarchical phoneme representations from neural signals, significantly improving Chinese phoneme decoding performance and achieving state-of-the-art. The findings demonstrate the feasibility of constructing high-performance Chinese speech BCIs based on phoneme decoding.