A Neurophysiological Perspective on Speech Processing in "The Neurobiology of Language"

Speech is the dominant communication means in humans, and it is perhaps the most complex stimulus that the human brain is exposed to everyday. Although the processing of complex spectrotemporal acoustic by the auditory system signals is fairly well-understood, the specifics of speech decoding remain quite enigmatic. This chapter builds on the idea that the human auditory cortex is ideally suited to extract the temporal structure of speech main acoustic units (i.e., the phonemes and syllables). We bring together different models grounded on the assumption that the quasiperiodic temporal structure of collective neural activity in auditory cortex represents the ideal mechanical infrastructure to solve the speech demultiplexing problem (i.e., the fractioning of connected speech into linguistic constituents of variable size).