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Related Experiment Video

Updated: May 22, 2026

Stimulating the Lip Motor Cortex with Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation

Stimulating the Lip Motor Cortex with Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation

Published on: June 14, 2014

Auditory-motor processing of speech sounds.

Riikka Möttönen¹, Rebekah Dutton, Kate E Watkins

¹Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3UD, UK. riikka.mottonen@psy.ox.ac.uk

Cerebral Cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991)

|May 15, 2012

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

The articulatory motor cortex influences auditory processing of speech sounds. Disrupting this brain region impairs speech sound discrimination, highlighting the role of motor control in auditory perception.

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Area of Science:

Neuroscience
Auditory Perception
Motor Control

Background:

Motor regions controlling speech articulators activate during speech perception.
The influence of the articulatory motor cortex on auditory processing of speech sounds remains unclear.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate if the articulatory motor cortex modulates auditory processing of speech sounds.
To determine the effect of disrupting the articulatory motor cortex on speech sound discrimination without demanding tasks.

Main Methods:

Electroencephalography (EEG) recorded brain responses to sound sequence changes.
Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) disrupted lip or hand representations in the motor cortex.
Participants observed silent videos during auditory stimulation and TMS.

Main Results:

Disrupting the lip representation in the motor cortex suppressed responses to speech sound changes.
Disruption of the hand representation had no effect on speech sound processing.
Responses to piano tones were unaffected by lip representation disruption.

Conclusions:

The articulatory motor cortex plays a role in automatic auditory discrimination of speech sounds.
Auditory-motor interactions are crucial for efficient neural analysis of speech.
Disruptions within the articulatory motor cortex, but not other motor areas, impair speech sound discrimination.