Editorial: Current research and emerging directions on the cognitive and neural organization of speech processing

(2015) Editorial: Current research and emerging directions on the cognitive and neural organization of speech processing. This Research Topic consists of 14 manuscripts discussing the cognitive and neural organization of speech processing. The contributions are grouped around four themes: (1) Spoken language comprehension under difficult listening conditions; (2) Sub-lexical processing; (3) Sensorimotor processing of speech; (4) Speech production. Seven papers addressed speech perception under challenging listening conditions. Van Engen and Peelle (2014) discuss the effects of processing speech in an unfamiliar regional or foreign accent. They argue that, as perceiving accented speech incurs a processing cost, just like other types of distortions such as background noise, it should also be regarded as representing a challenging listening condition. Neger et al. (2014) focused on plasticity of speech processing in statistical and perceptual learning tasks in aging. They conclude that perceptual and statistical learning share mechanisms of implicit regularity detection, but that the ability to detect statistical regularities is impaired in older adults for fast visual sequences. Dekerle et al. (2014) examined whether speech perception in a multi-speaker background relies on semantic interference between the background and target speaker using a semantic priming paradigm in three experiments. Their results indicate that higher-level linguistic processes such as semantic priming may not be as automatic as commonly thought but are subjected to the limits of cognitive resources such as working memory and attention. Yi et al. (2014) evaluate how processing of foreign-accented speech relates to social cognition. It was concluded that foreign-accented speech perception engages greater activation of neural systems underlying speech perception, and that implicit Asian-foreign association is related to with decreased neural efficiency in early spectrotemporal processing. Vitello et al. (2014) used fMRI to address the question of how semantic ambiguities are resolved during speech comprehension. Strauß et al. (2014) examined through literature review whether neural oscillations in the alpha frequency range (∼10 Hz) act as a neural mechanism to selectively inhibit the processing of noise to improve auditory selective attention to task-relevant speech signals. Ding and Simon (2014) discuss whether cortical entrained activity is related more closely to speech perception or to auditory encoding that is not specific to speech, by reviewing evidence regarding various hypotheses about the functional roles of cortical entrainment to speech. Three papers focused on perception of speech at sub-lexical levels. Deschamps and Tremblay (2014) studied perception of sub-lexical information by examining the neural bases of processing …