Phonetic Feature Encoding in Human Superior Temporal Gyrus
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Deciphering Language: Consonants and vowels represent basic building blocks of human language. How their characteristics are extracted from acoustic speech input is not well understood. Directly recording from the superior temporal gyrus of patients as part of their clinical evaluation for epilepsy surgery, Mesgarani et al. (p. 1006 , published online 30 January; see the Perspective by Grodzinsky and Nelken ) investigated neural responses while the subjects listened to continuous speech. The findings reveal how both vowels and consonants of different phonetic categories are encoded.
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Neural activity in the STG encodes acoustic features during speech perception and may be used to reconstruct perceived speech.
“Neural activity in the STG encodes acoustic features — for example, recurring speech sound patterns in the mel-spectrogram — during speech perception53,54 and may be used to reconstruct perceived speech55,56.”
From The speech neuroprosthesis (2024) · cites this paper as [54]
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- Authors
- Mesgarani, N., Cheung, C., Johnson, K., & Chang, E. F.
- Affiliations
- University of California, San Francisco (US)
- University of California, Berkeley (US)
- Corresponding author
- Mesgarani, Nima
- Chang, Edward F.
- Venue
- Science
- Published
- 2014-02-28
- Volume
- 343
- Issue
- 6174
- Pages
- 1006-1010
- ISSN
- 0036-8075 (ISSN-L)
- 1095-9203
- PMC
- PMC4350233
- OpenAlex
- W2079207700
- Cited by
- 993
- References
- 33
- Citations by year
- 2026: 62 · 2025: 85 · 2024: 83 · 2023: 77 · 2022: 80 · 2021: 87 · 2020: 137 · 2019: 79 · 2018: 84 · 2017: 70 · 2016: 55 · 2015: 66 · 2014: 27
- FWCI
- 100.81
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Locations
- Science (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (acceptedVersion)
- PubMed Central (acceptedVersion)
- eScholarship (California Digital Library) (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- National Institutes of Health (DP2-OD00862, 1dp2od008627-01, 5r00ns065120-04)
- National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (R01DC012379)
- National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (L30 NS060463, R00-NS065120)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Phonetics and Phonology Research
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Neuroscience and Music Perception
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism
- Keywords
- superior temporal gyrus, speech perception, connected speech, auditory cortex
- MeSH terms
- Auditory Cortex, Female, Humans, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Male, Phonetics, Speech Acoustics, Speech Perception
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