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Joint, distributed and hierarchically organized encoding of linguistic features in the human auditory cortex
Menoua Keshishian1,2, Serdar Akkol3, Jose Herrero3,4
1Department of Electrical Engineering, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA.
Nature Human Behaviour
|March 2, 2023
Summary
The human auditory cortex hierarchically maps speech sounds to meaning, encoding linguistic features from basic phonetics to complex semantics. This cumulative process preserves acoustic details, supporting models of spoken word recognition.
Area of Science:
- Neuroscience
- Linguistics
- Psychology
Background:
- The exact function of the human auditory cortex in speech processing remains unclear.
- Understanding how speech sounds are converted into meaning is crucial for neurolinguistics.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the neural encoding of linguistic features within the human auditory cortex.
- To explore the hierarchical organization of speech sound representation.
Main Methods:
- Intracranial recordings from the auditory cortex of neurosurgical patients during natural speech listening.
- Analysis of neural responses to phonetic, phonotactic, word frequency, and lexical-semantic information.
Main Results:
- Identified explicit, temporally ordered, and anatomically distributed neural encoding of multiple linguistic features.
- Revealed a hierarchical pattern where distinct auditory areas represent prelexical and postlexical information.
- Found that higher-level features were encoded in areas with longer latencies and greater distance from the primary auditory cortex, while lower-level features were preserved.
Conclusions:
- The auditory cortex exhibits a cumulative mapping from sound to meaning.
- Neural representations preserve acoustic variations, supporting existing neurolinguistic and psycholinguistic models of spoken word recognition.
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