RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Parallel streams define the temporal dynamics of speech processing across human auditory cortex
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 097485
DO 10.1101/097485
A1 Liberty S. Hamilton
A1 Erik Edwards
A1 Edward F. Chang
YR 2017
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/01/03/097485.abstract
AB To derive meaning from speech, we must extract multiple dimensions of concurrent information from incoming speech signals, including phonetic and prosodic cues. Equally important is the detection of acoustic cues that give structure and context to the information we hear, such as sentence boundaries. How the brain organizes this information processing is unknown. Here, using data-driven computational methods on an extensive set of high-density intracranial recordings, we reveal a large-scale partitioning of the entire human speech cortex into two spatially distinct regions that detect important cues for parsing natural speech. These caudal (Zone 1) and rostral (Zone 2) regions work in parallel to detect onsets and prosodic information, respectively, within naturally spoken sentences. In contrast, local processing within each region supports phonetic feature encoding. These findings demonstrate a fundamental organizational property of the human auditory cortex that has been previously unrecognized.