PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Bahar Khalighinejad
AU  - Jose L. Herrero
AU  - Stephan Bickel
AU  - Ashesh D. Mehta
AU  - Nima Mesgarani
TI  - Functional characterization of human Heschl’s gyrus in response to natural speech
AID  - 10.1101/2020.06.29.178178
DP  - 2020 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 2020.06.29.178178
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/06/30/2020.06.29.178178.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/06/30/2020.06.29.178178.full
AB  - Heschl’s gyrus (HG) is a brain area that includes the primary auditory cortex in humans. Due to the limitations in obtaining direct neural measurements from this region during naturalistic speech listening, the functional organization and the role of HG in speech perception remains uncertain. Here, we used intracranial EEG to directly record the neural activity in HG in eight neurosurgical patients as they listened to continuous speech stories. We studied the spatial distribution of acoustic tuning and the organization of linguistic feature encoding. We found a main gradient of change from posteromedial to anterolateral parts of HG. Along this direction, we observed a decrease in frequency and temporal modulation tuning, and an increase in phonemic representation, speaker normalization, speech-sensitivity, and response latency. We did not observe a difference between the two brain hemispheres. These findings reveal a functional role for HG in processing and transforming simple to complex acoustic features and informs neurophysiological models of speech processing in the human auditory cortex.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.