Journal
JOURNAL OF NEUROSCIENCE
Volume 37, Issue 8, Pages 2176-2185Publisher
SOC NEUROSCIENCE
DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2383-16.2017
Keywords
EEG; event-related potential; phonemes; speech
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Funding
- National Institutes of Health, National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders [DC014279]
- Pew Charitable Trusts, Pew Biomedical Scholars Program
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Humans are unique in their ability to communicate using spoken language. However, it remains unclear how the speech signal is transformed and represented in the brain at different stages of the auditory pathway. In this study, we characterized electroencephalography responses to continuous speech by obtaining the time-locked responses to phoneme instances (phoneme-related potential). We showed that responses to different phoneme categories are organized by phonetic features. We found that each instance of a phoneme in continuous speech produces multiple distinguishable neural responses occurring as early as 50 ms and as late as 400 ms after the phoneme onset. Comparing the patterns of phoneme similarity in the neural responses and the acoustic signals confirms a repetitive appearance of acoustic distinctions of phonemes in the neural data. Analysis of the phonetic and speaker information in neural activations revealed that different time intervals jointly encode the acoustic similarity of both phonetic and speaker categories. These findings provide evidence for a dynamic neural transformation of low-level speech features as they propagate along the auditory pathway, and form an empirical framework to study the representational changes in learning, attention, and speech disorders.
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