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Foreign Accent and Forensic Speaker Identification in Voice Lineups: The Influence of Acoustic Features Based on Prosody

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Left dorsal speech stream components and their contribution to phonological processing.

Takenobu Murakami¹, Christian A Kell², Julia Restle²

¹Department of Neurology, Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, D-60528, Germany, Department of Neurology, Fukushima Medical University, Fukushima, 960-1295, Japan, and.

The Journal of Neuroscience : the Official Journal of the Society for Neuroscience

|January 30, 2015

Summary

The left dorsal stream is crucial for speech production and perception. Disrupting this auditory-motor pathway impacts speech processing and motor cortex excitability.

Keywords:

articulatory motor cortex dorsal auditory stream motor-evoked potential phonological processing repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation transient virtual lesion

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Area of Science:

Neuroscience
Speech Science
Cognitive Science

Background:

Models suggest an auditory-motor pathway in the left hemisphere's dorsal stream for speech processing.
The precise role of this pathway in speech perception and production remains unclear.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate the contribution of the left dorsal speech-processing stream to auditory-motor mapping.
To examine the effects of disrupting dorsal stream components on speech motor cortex excitability and phonological processing.

Main Methods:

Used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)-navigated repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) to virtually lesion components of the left dorsal stream in healthy subjects.
Measured speech-related facilitation of articulatory motor cortex (M1) excitability via motor-evoked potential (MEP) amplitude of a lip muscle.
Assessed speech processing performance using phonological tests, including syllable and pseudoword repetition.

Main Results:

rTMS of posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS), sylvian parieto-temporal region (SPT), and combined pars opercularis of the inferior frontal gyrus (pIFG) and dorsal premotor cortex (dPMC) disrupted speech-related MEP facilitation.
Disruptions were specific to the dorsal stream, not observed with ventral stream or occipital site stimulation.
Dorsal stream rTMS impaired processing of fast acoustic speech transients and abolished the correlation between MEP facilitation and repetition performance.

Conclusions:

Provided direct evidence for left dorsal stream's role in auditory-motor mapping, causing specific speech-related MEP facilitation in articulatory M1.
Identified pSTS and SPT as critical posterior input regions, and pIFG and dPMC as parallel frontal pathways.
Confirmed the necessity of the left dorsal stream for processing rapid acoustic speech signals.