Normalization (sociology)

Sociology

Demography

Artificial intelligence

Psychology

Neuroscience

Anthropology

Syllabic verse

Neurocomputational speech processing

Perception

Superior temporal gyrus

Functional magnetic resonance imaging

Auditory cortex

Speech recognition

Population

Categorical perception

Computer science

Categorization

Speech perception

Annual Review of Psychology

Human speech perception results from neural computations that transform external acoustic speech signals into internal representations of words. The superior temporal gyrus (STG) contains the nonprimary auditory cortex and is a critical locus for phonological processing. Here, we describe how speech sound representation in the STG relies on fundamentally nonlinear and dynamical processes, such as categorization, normalization, contextual restoration, and the extraction of temporal structure. A spatial mosaic of local cortical sites on the STG exhibits complex auditory encoding for distinct acoustic-phonetic and prosodic features. We propose that as a population ensemble, these distributed patterns of neural activity give rise to abstract, higher-order phonemic and syllabic representations that support speech perception. This review presents a multi-scale, recurrent model of phonological processing in the STG, highlighting the critical interface between auditory and language systems.

Speech Computations of the Human Superior Temporal Gyrus