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Speech rhythms and their neural foundations

Nature Reviews Neuroscience volume 21, pages 322–334 (2020)Cite this article

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Abstract

The recognition of spoken language has typically been studied by focusing on either words or their constituent elements (for example, low-level features or phonemes). More recently, the ‘temporal mesoscale’ of speech has been explored, specifically regularities in the envelope of the acoustic signal that correlate with syllabic information and that play a central role in production and perception processes. The temporal structure of speech at this scale is remarkably stable across languages, with a preferred range of rhythmicity of 2– 8 Hz. Importantly, this rhythmicity is required by the processes underlying the construction of intelligible speech. A lot of current work focuses on audio-motor interactions in speech, highlighting behavioural and neural evidence that demonstrates how properties of perceptual and motor systems, and their relation, can underlie the mesoscale speech rhythms. The data invite the hypothesis that the speech motor cortex is best modelled as a neural oscillator, a conjecture that aligns well with current proposals highlighting the fundamental role of neural oscillations in perception and cognition. The findings also show motor theories (of speech) in a different light, placing new mechanistic constraints on accounts of the action–perception interface.

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Fig. 1: Different timescale representations of a generic acoustic speech signal.
Fig. 2: Speech production exhibits rhythmicity.
Fig. 3: Cortical structures supporting spoken language and sensorimotor interaction.
Fig. 4: Speech production system can be modelled as an oscillator.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank O. Ghitza and J. Orpella for valuable feedback. They acknowledge the support of the Max Planck Society and NIH R01DC05660.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Neuroscience, Max Planck Institute, Frankfurt, Germany

    David Poeppel

  2. Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, NY, USA

    David Poeppel & M. Florencia Assaneo

  3. Instituto de Neurobiologia, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México Juriquilla, Querétaro, México

    M. Florencia Assaneo

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  1. David Poeppel
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Correspondence to David Poeppel.

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Glossary

Distinctive features

Stable auditory and/or articulatory patterns that distinguish phonemes, for example ‘voicing’ in /b/ versus /p/.

Phones

Brief segments of speech that have characteristic physical or perceptual attributes.

Phonemes

The speech elements of a language (vowels and consonants) that encode words.

Segmentation

The process of chunking the continuous acoustic stream of spoken language into units.

Decoding

Mapping the segmented acoustic chunks into linguistic units (phonemes, syllables or words) stored in the mental dictionary.

Audio-motor integration

The alignment or merging of information computed in the auditory and (speech) motor systems.

Spectrogram

A visualization of how the frequency composition of a signal evolves over time.

Critical band filtering

Decomposing a signal into different frequency bands defined according to the frequency response of the relevant biophysical system.

1/f noise spectrum

The power spectrum of noise decreases with frequency, an attribute of many biological signals.

Spectrum

A representation of how much energy a signal carries in each frequency band.

Vocal tract

The set of anatomical cavities above the larynx that shape the production of speech.

Velum

Part of the roof of the oral cavity comprising connective tissue and muscle, also called the soft palate.

Syllable

A basic unit of spoken language, typically comprising a vowel (energy peak) with adjoining consonants (for example, /bar/), and thus a short sequence of speech sounds.

Entrainment

The synchronization of brain activity to the temporal structure of a stimulus or between the activity of neural elements.

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Poeppel, D., Assaneo, M.F. Speech rhythms and their neural foundations. Nat Rev Neurosci 21, 322–334 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41583-020-0304-4

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