Representing Segment-tone Connections in the Human Cortex: Evidence from the Rapid Hebbian Learning of Novel Tone Words7

Spoken language is an important form of human communication. The capacity to learn new spoken words is a basic brain function for any individual during the life span. With exponential growth of information exchange, people encounter a large amount of novel words, such as neologism (e.g., Google), jargon (e.g., app), and terminology (e.g., optogenetics). In experimental contexts, word-like pseudo-words are used to represent novel words. A general practice for creating novel words is to derive novel segment patterns from existing words by replacing one