Seeking the neurobiological bases of speech perception

One of the most highly developed human abilities is communication by speech. Throughout the years, research on speech perception has demonstrated that humans are well adapted to extract highly encoded linguistic information from the speech signal. The sophisticated nature of these capacities and their early appearance during development suggest the existence of a rich biological substrate for speech perception. In the present paper, we describe some of these important capacities and examine research from different domains that may help illuminate the nature of their biological foundations.