Central auditory processing: a view from auditory neuroscience

The purpose of this report is to overview some recent advances in basic science that help us understand the roles of the central auditory nervous system in hearing. Particularly at rostral levels, neural representations of the acoustic signal are shaped by convergent inputs and show some degree of plasticity, even in adults. The fidelity with which brain regions represent a stimulus dimension is heterogeneous, and this has demonstrable implications for the perceptual consequences of damage to those regions. So-called higher-level disorders (e.g., phonologic ones) have become increasingly understandable, largely through work in cognitive neuroscience, which has begun to describe the functional architecture of the processes mediating sound recognition and comprehension.