Wednesday, May 16, 2007

The Cortical Organization of Speech Processing

Our new article, "The Cortical Organization of Speech Processing" has recently been published in Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 8, 393-402 (May 2007). Although it is an extension of the model we proposed in our 2000 TICS and 2004 Cognition papers, there are several new features in the current proposal. One is the claim that within the ventral stream there are parallel routes from acoustic input to lexical access. Another is that within the dorsal stream, there are also parallel circuits, one supporting auditory-motor integration at the phoneme level, and another supporting auditory-motor integration at the level of sequences of phonemes or syllables. We also suggest that the dorsal auditory-motor integration system may be fundamentally organized around the vocal tract effector system, rather than the auditory-system per se. More on these recent claims in future posts. Let us know what you think of the new paper!

1 comment:

David Poeppel said...

Let me amplify something Greg mentioned: the claim about the parallel routes in lexical access is not 'innocent' - if on the right track, it has all sorts of provocative implications. Briefly, the idea is that the mapping from sounds to lexical entries occurs on (at least) two temporal granularities, one corresponding roughly to phonemic (segmental) information and one to syllabic information. That view commits us to a model of lexical representation and phonological structure. While the figure in our new paper may look innocent, its implications are far reaching.