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The Journal of Neuroscience, April 22, 2009, 29(16):5234-5239; doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.5758-08.2009

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Brief Communications
Expertise with Artificial Nonspeech Sounds Recruits Speech-Sensitive Cortical Regions

Robert Leech,1 Lori L. Holt,2,3 Joseph T. Devlin,4 and Frederic Dick5,6

1Division of Neuroscience and Mental Health, Imperial College London, Hammersmith Hospital, London W12 0NN, United Kingdom, 2Department of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University, and 3Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition, 115 Mellon Institute, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15213, 4Cognitive, Perceptual and Brain Sciences, UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, UCL, London WC1H 0AP, United Kingdom, 5School of Psychology, Birkbeck, London WC1E 7HX, United Kingdom, and 6Center for Research in Language, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California 92093-0526

Correspondence should be addressed to Dr. Robert Leech, Division of Neuroscience and Mental Health and Medical Research Council Clinical Sciences Centre, Imperial College London, Hammersmith Hospital Campus, Du Cane Road, London W12 0NN, UK. Email: r.leech{at}imperial.ac.uk

Regions of the human temporal lobe show greater activation for speech than for other sounds. These differences may reflect intrinsically specialized domain-specific adaptations for processing speech, or they may be driven by the significant expertise we have in listening to the speech signal. To test the expertise hypothesis, we used a video-game-based paradigm that tacitly trained listeners to categorize acoustically complex, artificial nonlinguistic sounds. Before and after training, we used functional MRI to measure how expertise with these sounds modulated temporal lobe activation. Participants' ability to explicitly categorize the nonspeech sounds predicted the change in pretraining to posttraining activation in speech-sensitive regions of the left posterior superior temporal sulcus, suggesting that emergent auditory expertise may help drive this functional regionalization. Thus, seemingly domain-specific patterns of neural activation in higher cortical regions may be driven in part by experience-based restructuring of high-dimensional perceptual space.

Received Dec. 3, 2008; revised Feb. 27, 2009; accepted March 21, 2009.

Correspondence should be addressed to Dr. Robert Leech, Division of Neuroscience and Mental Health and Medical Research Council Clinical Sciences Centre, Imperial College London, Hammersmith Hospital Campus, Du Cane Road, London W12 0NN, UK. Email: r.leech{at}imperial.ac.uk






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