Abstract

Despite decades of research, the functional neuroanatomy of speech processing has been difficult to characterize. A major impediment to progress may have been the failure to consider task effects when mapping speech-related processing systems. We outline a dual-stream model of speech processing that remedies this situation. In this model, a ventral stream processes speech signals for comprehension, and a dorsal stream maps acoustic speech signals to frontal lobe articulatory networks. The model assumes that the ventral stream is largely bilaterally organized — although there are important computational differences between the left- and right-hemisphere systems — and that the dorsal stream is strongly left-hemisphere dominant.

Author affiliations

1. Gregory Hickok is at the Department of Cognitive Sciences and the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, University of California, Irvine, California 92697-5100, USA.
2. David Poeppel is at the Departments of Linguistics and Biology, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742, USA.

Correspondence to: Gregory Hickok¹ Email: greg.hickok@uci.edu

Published online 13 April 2007

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