That cortical activity tracks the dynamics of auditory stimuli is reasonably well established. In speech and music perception, this phenomenon produces reliable coupling between the acoustic envelope of the sound input and the corresponding cortical responses. However, it remains unclear to what extent that neural tracking reflects low-level acoustic properties, as opposed to more abstract linguistic structures. In this talk, I will discuss a series of studies aimed at assessing the impact of higher-order linguistic information on the cortical processing of speech and music sounds. I will demonstrate methodologies for disentangling neural responses to stimulus properties at different abstraction levels, deriving multiple objective indices for probing auditory perception with experiments involving natural speech and music listening. I will then describe recent developments of these measures in the context of developmental research.