The Human Brain Tracks Speech More Closely in Time Than Other Sounds

Material below summarizes the article Dynamic Time-Locking Mechanism in the Cortical Representation of Spoken Words, published on June 8, 2020, in eNeuro and authored by Ali Faisal, Anni Nora, Hanna Renvall, Jaeho Seol, Elia Formisano, and Riitta Salmelin.

Highlights

• Computational modeling of cortical responses highlights the importance of accurate temporal tracking of speech in the auditory cortices.

• This time-locked encoding mechanism is likely pivotal for transforming the acoustic features into linguistic representations.

• No similar relevance of time-locked encoding was observed for nonspeech sounds, including temporally variable human-made sounds such as laughter.

About the Contributors

Anni Nora, MPSych DSc

Anni Nora is a postdoctoral researcher at the department of neuroscience and biomedical engineering at Aalto University.

Ali Faisal, PhD

Ali Faisal is an associate director of analytics at Coca Cola European Partners, UK.