Imagined Speech Brain-Computer Interface: A Task-Oriented Review of Neural Decoding.

Overview

1. Department of Language Science and Technology, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Hom, Kowloon, Hong Kong SAR, China

Abstract

Imagined speech decoding has attracted growing interest in brain–computer interface (BCI) research, as it may enable language-related information to be recovered from non-overt neural activity. Current studies in this area are often treated as a single, unified research problem, despite substantial differences in decoding target, output constraints, and system output forms. This review examines recent imagined speech decoding research from a task-oriented perspective, with a focus on how different neural decoding tasks are defined, constrained by their output spaces, and expressed through different output pathways. The included studies are organized into four main task levels: semantic/intent, phoneme/syllable, word, and sentence/language decoding. They are further compared along two auxiliary dimensions: output-space property and output pathway, with particular attention to closed-set and open-vocabulary settings. The review shows that current studies span markedly different linguistic granularities and communication objectives, from low-bandwidth intent recognition to text or speech reconstruction. Finally, it concludes that imagined speech should not be treated as a single homogeneous decoding problem, and that a task-oriented framework provides a clearer basis for comparing heterogeneous studies and guiding future communication-oriented BCI research.

Reproduced under the paper's license (CC BY), from the paper cited above.

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Data

Datasets cited

• github.com/scottwellington/feis, at github.com; found in the Zenodo archive record
• zenodo:3369178, at Zenodo; found in the references

Data Availability Statement

Not applicable.

Reproduced under the paper's license (CC BY), from the paper cited above.

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Version 1, 28 September 2026: the first record

Recorded: type, language, journal, volume, issue, pages, dates, 3 authors, 7 keywords, 6 MeSH terms, 2 funders, 136 references.

Cite

This paper

Zhang, H., Siok, W. T., & Wang, N. (2026). Imagined Speech Brain-Computer Interface: A Task-Oriented Review of Neural Decoding. Sensors (Basel, Switzerland), 26(10), 3212. https://doi.org/10.3390/s26103212

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