Temporal coding in the auditory cortex.
Speech is a complex acoustic signal showing a quasiperiodic structure at several timescales. Integrated neural signals recorded in the cortex also show periodicity at different timescales. In this chapter we outline the neural mechanisms that potentially allow the auditory cortex to segment and encode continuous speech. This chapter focuses on how the human auditory cortex uses the temporal structure of the acoustic signal to extract phonemes and syllables, the two major constituents of connected speech. We argue that the quasiperiodic structure of collective neural activity in auditory cortex represents the ideal mechanical infrastructure to fractionate continuous speech into linguistic constituents of variable sizes.
Department of Neurosciences, University Medical Centre, Geneva, Switzerland; Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, NY, USA.
Luc H
LH
Arnal
Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, NY, USA.
David
D
Poeppel
Department of Neurosciences, University Medical Centre, Geneva, Switzerland. Electronic address: Anne-Lise.Giraud@unige.ch.
Anne-Lise
AL
Giraud
D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000818:Animals; D001303:Auditory Cortex / Q000502:physiology*; D001307:Auditory Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D007839:Functional Laterality; D006801:Humans; D013997:Time Factors
Auditory cortex; cortical oscillations; dyslexia; multiple timescales processing; speech; temporal processing