Open AccessSpeech Computations of the Human Superior Temporal Gyrus
Author(s) -
Ilina Bhaya-Grossman,
Edward F. Chang
Publication year - 2022
Publication title -
annual review of psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 10.358
H-Index - 243
eISSN - 1545-2085
pISSN - 0066-4308
DOI - 10.1146/annurev-psych-022321-035256
Subject(s) - superior temporal gyrus , syllabic verse , categorical perception , speech recognition , auditory cortex , perception , categorization , psychology , speech perception , computer science , neurocomputational speech processing , normalization (sociology) , population , artificial intelligence , neuroscience , functional magnetic resonance imaging , demography , sociology , anthropology
Human speech perception results from neural computations that transform external acoustic speech signals into internal representations of words. The superior temporal gyrus (STG) contains the nonprimary auditory cortex and is a critical locus for phonological processing. Here, we describe how speech sound representation in the STG relies on fundamentally nonlinear and dynamical processes, such as categorization, normalization, contextual restoration, and the extraction of temporal structure. A spatial mosaic of local cortical sites on the STG exhibits complex auditory encoding for distinct acoustic-phonetic and prosodic features. We propose that as a population ensemble, these distributed patterns of neural activity give rise to abstract, higher-order phonemic and syllabic representations that support speech perception. This review presents a multi-scale, recurrent model of phonological processing in the STG, highlighting the critical interface between auditory and language systems.