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Cerebral Cortex Advance Access published online on December 5, 2006
Cerebral Cortex, doi:10.1093/cercor/bhl133
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© The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Multiple Stages of Auditory Speech Perception Reflected in Event-Related fMRI

Jonas Obleser1, Jonas Zimmermann, John Van Meter and Josef P. Rauschecker

Georgetown University School of Medicine, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA, 1 Current address: Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, United Kingdom

Address correspondence to Dr Jonas Obleser, Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, 17 Queen Square, London WC1N 3AR, UK. Email: j.obleser{at}ucl.ac.uk.

Speech processing in auditory cortex and beyond is a remarkable yet poorly understood faculty of the listening brain. Here we show that stop consonants, as the most transient constituents of speech, are sufficient to involve speech perception circuits in the human superior temporal cortex. Left anterolateral superior temporal cortex showed a stronger response in blood oxygenation level–dependent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to intelligible consonantal bursts compared with incomprehensible control sounds matched for spectrotemporal complexity. Simultaneously, the left posterior superior temporal plane (including planum temporale [PT]) exhibited a noncategorical responsivity to complex stimulus acoustics across all trials, showing no preference for intelligible speech sounds. Multistage hierarchical processing of speech sounds is thus revealed with fMRI, providing evidence for a role of the PT in the fundamental stages of the acoustic analysis of complex sounds, including speech.

Key Words: auditory cortex • consonants • fMRI • hierarchical processing • planum temporale • speech


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