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Cerebral Cortex Advance Access published online on October 5, 2005
Cerebral Cortex, doi:10.1093/cercor/bhj047
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© The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Article

Now You Hear It, Now You Don't: Transient Traces of Consonants and their Nonspeech Analogues in the Human Brain

Jonas Obleser 1*, Sophie K. Scott 2, and Carsten Eulitz 3

1 Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, 17 Queen Square, London, WC1N 3AR, UK; University of Konstanz, PO Box D25, 78457 Konstanz, Germany
2 Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, 17 Queen Square, London, WC1N 3AR, UK
3 University of Konstanz, PO Box D25, 78457 Konstanz, Germany

* To whom correspondence should be addressed.
Jonas Obleser, E-mail: jonas{at}obleser.de


  Abstract

The apparently effortless identification of speech is one of the human auditory cortex' finest and least understood functions. This is partly due to difficulties to tease apart effects of acoustic and phonetic attributes of speech sounds. Here we present evidence from magnetic source imaging that the auditory cortex represents speech sounds (such as [g] and [t]) in a topographically orderly fashion that is based on phonetic features. Moreover, this mapping is dependent on intelligibility. Only when consonants are identifiable as members of a native speech sound category is topographical spreading out in the auditory cortex observed. Feature separation in the cortex also varies with a listener's ability to tell these easy-to-confuse consonants from one another. This is the first demonstration that speech-specific maps of features can be identified in human auditory cortex, and it will further help us to delineate speech processing pathways based on models from functional neuroimaging and non-human primates.

Keywords: auditory cortex; consonants; intelligibility; magnetic source imaging; magnetoencephalography; MEG; N100; N100m speech.
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