Cortical processing of arithmetic and of language rely on both shared and task-specific neural mechanisms, which should also be dissociable from the particular sensory modality used to probe them. Here, spoken arithmetical and non-mathematical statements were employed to investigate neural processing of arithmetic, compared with general language processing, in an attention-modulated cocktail party paradigm. Magnetoencephalography (MEG) data were recorded from 22 human subjects listening to audio mixtures of spoken sentences and arithmetic equations while selectively attending to one of the two speech streams. Short sentences and simple equations were presented diotically at fixed and distinct word/symbol and sentence/equation rates. Critically, this allowed neural responses to acoustics, words, and symbols to be dissociated from responses to sentences and equations. Indeed, the simultaneous neural processing of the acoustics of words and symbols was observed in auditory cortex for both streams. Neural resp...