Joint, distributed and hierarchically organized encoding of linguistic features in the human auditory cortex

Menoua Keshishian, Serdar Akkol, Jose Herrero, Stephan Bickel, Ashesh D. Mehta and Nima Mesgarani ()
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Menoua Keshishian: Columbia University
Serdar Akkol: Northwell Health
Jose Herrero: Northwell Health
Stephan Bickel: Northwell Health
Ashesh D. Mehta: Northwell Health
Nima Mesgarani: Columbia University

Nature Human Behaviour, 2023, vol. 7, issue 5, 740-753

Abstract: Abstract The precise role of the human auditory cortex in representing speech sounds and transforming them to meaning is not yet fully understood. Here we used intracranial recordings from the auditory cortex of neurosurgical patients as they listened to natural speech. We found an explicit, temporally ordered and anatomically distributed neural encoding of multiple linguistic features, including phonetic, prelexical phonotactics, word frequency, and lexical–phonological and lexical–semantic information. Grouping neural sites on the basis of their encoded linguistic features revealed a hierarchical pattern, with distinct representations of prelexical and postlexical features distributed across various auditory areas. While sites with longer response latencies and greater distance from the primary auditory cortex encoded higher-level linguistic features, the encoding of lower-level features was preserved and not discarded. Our study reveals a cumulative mapping of sound to meaning and provides empirical evidence for validating neurolinguistic and psycholinguistic models of spoken word recognition that preserve the acoustic variations in speech.

Date: 2023
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DOI: 10.1038/s41562-023-01520-0

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