Functional Organization of Human Sensorimotor Cortex for Speech Articulation

By Kristofer E. Bouchard, Nima Mesgarani, Keith Johnson, Edward F. Chang. Nature, 2013

647 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Speaking is one of the most complex actions that we perform, but nearly all of us learn to do it effortlessly. Production of fluent speech requires the precise, coordinated movement of multiple articulators (for example, the lips, jaw, tongue and larynx) over rapid time scales. Here we used high-resolution, multi-electrode cortical recordings during the production of consonant-vowel syllables to determine the organization of speech sensorimotor cortex in humans. We found speech-articulator representations that are arranged somatotopically on ventral pre- and post-central gyri, and that partially overlap at individual electrodes. These representations were coordinated temporally as sequences during syllable production. Spatial patterns of cortical activity showed an emergent, population-level representation, which was organized by phonetic features. Over tens of milliseconds, the spatial patterns transitioned between distinct representations for different consonants and vowels. These results reveal the dynamic organization of speech sensorimotor cortex during the generation of multi-articulator movements that underlies our ability to speak.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9644258ad50b7a94374aae024d25b12ed4f6f9cf

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Citations in the corpus

Speech synthesis from neural decoding of spoken sentences (2019, methodology): “…9 decodes articulatory kinematic features from continuous neural activity (high-gamma amplitude envelope 10 and low frequency component 11,12 , see methods) recorded from ventral sensorimotor cortex (vSMC) 13 , superior temporal gyrus (STG) 14 , and inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) 15 (Figure 1a, b).”
Dimensionality reduction for large-scale neural recordings (2014, methodology): “…reduction has also been fruitfully applied to population recordings in other studies of decision-making 7–9 , the motor system 10–12 and the olfactory system 13,14 , as well as in working memory 15,16 , visual attention 17 , the auditory system 18 , rule learning 19 , speech 20 and more.”
Distinct laminar origins of sensory-evoked high-gamma and low-frequency ECoG signals revealed by optogenetics (2026, unknown): “Among these, high gamma (H γ : 65 to 170 Hz) is widely used as a signature of spatially localized neuronal activity in both humans (1, 4, 5, 7, 13–16) and animals (6, 9, 14, 17–21).”
Distinct laminar origins of high-gamma and low-frequency ECoG signals revealed by optogenetics (2025, unknown): “Among these, high-gamma (Hγ: 65 -170 Hz) is widely used as a signature of spatially localized neuronal activity in both humans 1,4,5,7,13– 16 and animals 6,9,14,17 –21 .”
Processing of auditory feedback in perisylvian and insular cortex (2024, background): “Notably, they observed that motor cortex was organized according to place of articulation during speech production, as would be expected from somatotopic representations (Bouchard et al., 2013), but organized according to manner of articulation during passive listening.”