[News] Brain area that decodes speech timing discovered
In spoken language and structure of human speech, speech timing is important elements. To understand speech, brain need to interpret the phonemes, syllables and words. Therefore the brain need to take shortcuts in processing the sounds.
The “speech quilts”, which making a new sound by cutting and reassembling 30-960-millisecond chunks of the recorded sounds, was used in the study. The researchers also used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine to check the brain activation during giving the new sounds to subjects. Before this study, superior temporal sulcus (STS) was known as the region that integrates auditory and other sensory information. However, from the experiment, the researchers found the brain region, the STS, highly activated. It shows that STS is concerning with time structure in speech. For the future study, researchers plan to study whether the activation of STS in familiar speech is similar to unfamiliar speech.
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