Inhibitory control of speech production in the human premotor frontal cortex

Voluntary, flexible stopping of speech output is an essential aspect of speech motor control, especially during natural conversations. The cognitive and neural mechanisms of speech inhibition are not well understood. Here we have recorded direct high-density cortical activity while participants engaged in continuous speech production and were visually cued to stop speaking. Neural recordings revealed distinct activity in the premotor frontal cortex correlated with stopping speech. This activity was found in largely separate cortical sites from regions encoding vocal tract articulatory movements. Moreover, this activity primarily occurred with abrupt stopping in the middle of an utterance, rather than naturally completing a phrase. Electrocortical stimulation at many premotor sites with inhibitory stop activity caused involuntary speech arrest, which contradicts previous clinical interpretations of this effect as evidence for critical centres of speech production. Together, these results suggest a previously unknown premotor cortical network that supports the inhibitory control of speech, providing implications for understanding both natural and altered speech production.