Identification of a pathway for intelligible speech in the left temporal lobe

By Sophie K. Scott, C. Blank, S. Rosen, R. Wise. Brain : a journal of neurology, 2000

1,161 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Summary It has been proposed that the identification of sounds, including species-specific vocalizations, by primates depends on anterior projections from the primary auditory cortex, an auditory pathway analogous to the ventral route proposed for the visual identification of objects. We have identified a similar route in the human for understanding intelligible speech. Using PET imaging to identify separable neural subsystems within the human auditory cortex, we used a variety of speech and speech-like stimuli with equivalent acoustic complexity but varying intelligibility. We have demonstrated that the left superior temporal sulcus responds to the presence of phonetic information, but its anterior part only responds if the stimulus is also intelligible. This novel observation demonstrates a left anterior temporal pathway for speech comprehension.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b99879d3f21b5983f328f97e4e18864a3f6c7cee

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Citations in the corpus

Maps and streams in the auditory cortex: nonhuman primates illuminate human speech processing (2009, background): “Within speech perception, there is evidence that speech sounds are hierarchically encoded, as the anterior superior temporal cortex responds as a function of speech intelligibility, and not stimulus complexity alon”
Syntactic and Semantic Modulation of Neural Activity during Auditory Sentence Comprehension (2006, background): “Mid-STS regions in the left hemisphere have recently been linked to phoneme recognition processes (Dehaene-Lambertz et al., 2005; Liebenthal, Binder, Spitzer, Possing, & Medler, 2005; Davis & Johnsrude, 2003; Binder et al., 2000; Scott, Blank, Rosen, & Wise, 2000 ).”
Semantic Processing in the Anterior Temporal Lobes: A Meta-analysis of the Functional Neuroimaging Literature (2010, background): “, 1996), whereas superior temporal areas are involved in the comprehension of spoken words and sentences (Scott & Johnsrude, 2003; Scott et al., 2000; Demonet et al., 1992).”
Functional Correlates of the Antero-Lateral Processing Hierarchy in Human Auditory Cortex (2011, background): “…regions of human auditory cortex are known to respond well to species-specific vocalizations (i.e., human speech and voices) (Binder et al., 2000; Scott et al., 2000; Belin et al., 2000; Leaver and Rauschecker, 2010), a clear functional delineation of belt and parabelt in humans has not yet been…”
Semantic impairment in stroke aphasia versus semantic dementia: a case-series comparison. (2006, background): “Within the auditory modality, passive listening produces activation along the left lateral temporal lobe which becomes more anterior as the intelligibility of speech stimuli is increased (Scott et al., 2000; Crinion et al., 2003).”
The brain basis of language processing: from structure to function. (2011, background): “The posterior STS, in contrast, was found to be equally activated by normal speech, rotated speech, and noise-vocoded speech (232), leading to the idea that this area is involved in the short-term representation of sequences of sounds that contain some phonetic information (without being necessarily”
Topographic mapping of a hierarchy of temporal receptive windows using a narrated story (2011, result): “This observation is in agreement with the findings of numerous previous studies examining levels of speech comprehension (Scott et al., 2000; Wilson et al., 2008; Whitney et al., 2009).”
The role of left inferior frontal and superior temporal cortex in sentence comprehension: localizing syntactic and semantic processes. (2003, positive): “Scott and collaborators (Scott et al., 2000) suggest that the processing of spoken language might be organized in the form of two separable pathways through the superior temporal lobe, starting from primary auditory cortex.”
Integration of auditory and visual information about objects in superior temporal sulcus. (2004, background): “, 2002) Regions anterior pSTS/MTG responded with an increased BOLD signal to and ventral to primary auditory cortex, labeled the both auditory and visual stimuli compared with fixation “what” stream, may be specialized for processing charbaseline, in contrast with adjacent auditory and visual acteri”
A review and synthesis of the first 20 years of PET and fMRI studies of heard speech, spoken language and reading (2012, background): “The special role of the left posterior temporal lobe in speech processing was re-considered (Celsis et al., 1999; Scott et al., 2000; Wise et al., 2001).”
Prelexical and lexical processing in listening (2004, neutral): “vowels; Scott et al., 2000: spectrally rotated sentences) shared the acoustic and”