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Identification of a pathway
for intelligible speech in the left temporal lobe*
Sophie K. Scott1,
C. Catrin Blank3, Stuart
Rosen2 and Richard J. S.
Wise3
1
Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and 2 Department of Phonetics
and Linguistics, University College London,
3 MRC Clinical Sciences Centre, Cyclotron Unit, Hammersmith Hospital,
London, UK
Correspondence
to: Sophie K. Scott, Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University
College London, London WC1N 3AR, UK E-mail: sophie.scott@ucl.ac.uk
*the full
text of this paper appears in Brain:
A journal of neurology, Vol. 123, No. 12, 2400-2406, December 2000
Abstract
It has been proposed that the identification of sounds, including
species-specific vocalizations, by primates depends on anterior
projections from the primary auditory cortex, an auditory pathway
analogous to the ventral route proposed for the visual identification
of objects. We have identified a similar route in the human for
understanding intelligible speech. Using
PET imaging to identify separable neural subsystems within the
human auditory cortex, we used a variety of speech and speech-like
stimuli with equivalent acoustic complexity but varying intelligibility.
We have demonstrated that the left superior temporal sulcus responds
to the presence of phonetic information, but its anterior part
only responds if the stimulus is also intelligible. This novel
observation demonstrates a left anterior temporal pathway for
speech comprehension. |
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