Responses in auditory cortex tend to be weaker, more phasic, and noisier than those of auditory brainstem and midbrain nuclei. Is the activity in cortex therefore merely a "degraded echo" of lower-level neural representations? In this issue of Neuron, Chechik and colleagues show that, while cortical responses indeed convey less sensory information than auditory midbrain neurons, their responses...

INTRODUCTION Neural encoding of speech begins with the analysis of the signal as a whole broken down into its sinusoidal components in the cochlea, which has to be conserved up to the higher auditory centers. Some of these components target the dead regions of the cochlea causing little or no excitation. Measuring aided speech-evoked auditory brainstem response elicited by speech stimuli with d...

Language impairment is a hallmark of autism spectrum disorders (ASD). The origin of the deficit is poorly understood although deficiencies in auditory processing have been detected in both perception and cortical encoding of speech sounds. Little is known about the processing and transcription of speech sounds at earlier (brainstem) levels or about how background noise may impact this transcrip...