Single-neuronal elements of speech production in humans

Arjun R. Khanna, William Muñoz, Young Joon Kim, Yoav Kfir, Angelique C. Paulk, Mohsen Jamali, Jing Cai, Martina L. Mustroph, Irene Caprara, Richard Hardstone, Mackenna Mejdell, Domokos Meszéna, Abigail Zuckerman, Jeffrey Schweitzer, Sydney Cash and Ziv M. Williams ()
Additional contact information
Arjun R. Khanna: Harvard Medical School
William Muñoz: Harvard Medical School
Young Joon Kim: Harvard Medical School
Yoav Kfir: Harvard Medical School
Angelique C. Paulk: Harvard Medical School
Mohsen Jamali: Harvard Medical School
Jing Cai: Harvard Medical School
Martina L. Mustroph: Harvard Medical School
Irene Caprara: Harvard Medical School
Richard Hardstone: Harvard Medical School
Mackenna Mejdell: Harvard Medical School
Domokos Meszéna: Harvard Medical School
Abigail Zuckerman: Harvard Medical School
Jeffrey Schweitzer: Harvard Medical School
Sydney Cash: Harvard Medical School
Ziv M. Williams: Harvard Medical School

Nature, 2024, vol. 626, issue 7999, 603-610

Abstract: Abstract Humans are capable of generating extraordinarily diverse articulatory movement combinations to produce meaningful speech. This ability to orchestrate specific phonetic sequences, and their syllabification and inflection over subsecond timescales allows us to produce thousands of word sounds and is a core component of language1,2. The fundamental cellular units and constructs by which we plan and produce words during speech, however, remain largely unknown. Here, using acute ultrahigh-density Neuropixels recordings capable of sampling across the cortical column in humans, we discover neurons in the language-dominant prefrontal cortex that encoded detailed information about the phonetic arrangement and composition of planned words during the production of natural speech. These neurons represented the specific order and structure of articulatory events before utterance and reflected the segmentation of phonetic sequences into distinct syllables. They also accurately predicted the phonetic, syllabic and morphological components of upcoming words and showed a temporally ordered dynamic. Collectively, we show how these mixtures of cells are broadly organized along the cortical column and how their activity patterns transition from articulation planning to production. We also demonstrate how these cells reliably track the detailed composition of consonant and vowel sounds during perception and how they distinguish processes specifically related to speaking from those related to listening. Together, these findings reveal a remarkably structured organization and encoding cascade of phonetic representations by prefrontal neurons in humans and demonstrate a cellular process that can support the production of speech.

Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06982-w Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nature:v:626:y:2024:i:7999:d:10.1038_s41586-023-06982-w

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/

DOI: 10.1038/s41586-023-06982-w

Access Statistics for this article

Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper

More articles in Nature from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().