Neuron
Volume 102, Issue 6, 19 June 2019, Pages 1096-1110
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Review
The Encoding of Speech Sounds in the Superior Temporal Gyrus

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Summary

The human superior temporal gyrus (STG) is critical for extracting meaningful linguistic features from speech input. Local neural populations are tuned to acoustic-phonetic features of all consonants and vowels and to dynamic cues for intonational pitch. These populations are embedded throughout broader functional zones that are sensitive to amplitude-based temporal cues. Beyond speech features, STG representations are strongly modulated by learned knowledge and perceptual goals. Currently, a major challenge is to understand how these features are integrated across space and time in the brain during natural speech comprehension. We present a theory that temporally recurrent connections within STG generate context-dependent phonological representations, spanning longer temporal sequences relevant for coherent percepts of syllables, words, and phrases.

Keywords

speech processing
superior temporal gyrus
auditory cortex
acoustic-phonetic features
temporal landmarks
context-dependent representation
phonological sequence
temporal integration
temporally recurrent connections
electrocorticography

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These authors contributed equally