Speech Perception: Cognitive Foundations and Cortical Implementation

Speech perception includes, minimally, the set of computations that transform continuously varying acoustic signals into linguistic representations that can be used for subsequent processing. The auditory and motor subroutines of this complex perceptual process are executed in a network of brain areas organized in ventral and dorsal parallel pathways, performing sound-to-meaning and sound-to-motor mappings, respectively. Research on speech using neurobiological techniques argues against narrow motor or auditory theories. To account for the range of cognitive and neural attributes, integrative computational models seem promising. KEYWORDS—functional anatomy of speech; dual-stream model; dorsal and ventral streams Understanding how speech signals are represented and processed in the human brain remains a core challenge for cognitive science and neuroscience. The neural basis of speech processing constitutes a fruitful area of inquiry at the interface between the cognitive and brain sciences insofar as there exist explicit and detailed models about the nature of the speech signal. First, there are hypotheses about what the elementary building blocks (or primitives) are. Second, there exists a growing body of data on the cortical regions and mechanisms that form the basis for processing speech.