Lecture | Tobias Overath | Acoustic and Linguistic Processing of Temporal Speech Structure

Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture

Tobias Overath | Psychology and Neuroscience | Duke University

Speech perception entails the transformation of the acoustic waveform that reaches our ears to linguistic representations (e.g., syntax, semantics) to enable communication. The nature of this acousto-linguistic transformation - how different acoustic properties of the speech signal are processed throughout the auditory system and then interface with linguistic representations - is still not fully understood. I will present data from a series of fMRI studies from my lab that allow the explicit dissociation of acoustic analyses and linguistic analyses of temporal speech structure, using a novel 'speech quilting' algorithm that controls the temporal structure of speech. The results suggest that superior temporal sulcus (STS) and left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) play important roles in the acousto-linguistic transformation of temporal speech structure.