Recent neuroimaging studies and neuropsychological data suggest that there are regions in posterior auditory cortex that participate both in speech perception and speech production. An outstanding question is whether the same neural regions support both perception and production or whether there exist discrete cortical fields subserving these functions. Previous neurophysiological studies sugge...

Motor theories of speech perception have been re-vitalized as a consequence of the discovery of mirror neurons. Some authors have even promoted a strong version of the motor theory, arguing that the motor speech system is critical for perception. Part of the evidence that is cited in favor of this claim is the observation from the early 1980s that individuals with Broca's aphasia, and therefore...

Based on results from functional imaging, cortex along the superior temporal sulcus (STS) has been suggested to subserve phoneme and pre-lexical speech perception. For vowel classification, both superior temporal plane (STP) and STS areas have been suggested relevant. Lesion of bilateral STS may conversely be expected to cause pure word deafness and possibly also impaired vowel classification. ...

The fluency and the reliability of speech production suggest a mechanism that links motor commands and sensory feedback. Here, we examined the neural organization supporting such links by using fMRI to identify regions in which activity during speech production is modulated according to whether auditory feedback matches the predicted outcome or not and by examining the overlap with the network ...

A theory of speech perception that maps between auditory input and articulatory features was most famously proposed by Liberman et al. (1967). Their theory was later revised by the same authors (Liberman & Mattingly, 1985) to account for new discoveries in comparative evolutionary biology and developmental psychology. Although not the first to propose that gestural features were the fundamental...

Although stuttering is regarded as a speech-specific disorder, there is a growing body of evidence suggesting that subtle abnormalities in the motor planning and execution of non-speech gestures exist in stuttering individuals. We hypothesized that people who stutter (PWS) would differ from fluent controls in their neural responses during motor planning and execution of both speech and non-spee...

It has been found that auditory-visual speech perception differs over languages, particularly between English and Japanese speakers. This difference emerges due to increased use of visual information by English speakers between 6 and 8 years [14]. This study investigates the linguistic factors that may cause changes in auditory-visual speech perception development. Children aged between 5 and 8...

The existence of feedback control mechanisms from motor to sensory systems is a central idea in speech production research. Consistent with the view that articulation modulates the activity of the auditory cortex, it has been shown that silent articulation improved identification of concordant speech sounds [1]. In the present study, we replicated and extended this finding by demonstrating that...

Humans show a remarkable ability to understand continuous speech even under adverse listening conditions. This ability critically relies on dynamically updated predictions of incoming sensory information, but exactly how top-down predictions improve speech processing is still unclear. Brain oscillations are a likely mechanism for these top-down predictions [1, 2]. Quasi-rhythmic components in s...

How does speech production relate to speech perception? To investigate the most suitable perceptual factors to predict the production skills of a speaker, we determined the visual acuity for speech movements, the auditory acuity for speech sounds, and the haptic acuity of speech organs, following equivalent protocols in all three modalities. These abilities were linked to the individual’s disti...