Phonological repetition-suppression in bilateral superior temporal sulci

Evidence has accumulated that posterior superior temporal sulcus (STS) is critically involved in phonological processing during speech perception, although there are conflicting accounts regarding the degree of lateralization. The current fMRI experiment aimed to identify phonological processing during speech perception through repetition-suppression effects. Repetition-suppression occurs when brain activity decreases from repetitive presentation of stimulus characteristics, in regions of cortex that process those characteristics. We manipulated the degree of phonological repetition among words in short lists to obtain systematic decreases in brain response, indicative of phonological processing. The fMRI experiment presented seventeen participants with recorded wordlists, of low, medium, or high phonological repetition, defined by how many phonemes were shared among words. Bilaterally, middle STS demonstrated activity differences consistent with our prediction of repetition-suppression, as responses decreased systematically with each increase in phonological repetition. Phonological repetition-suppression in bilateral STS converges with neuroimaging evidence for phonological processing, and word deafness resulting from bilateral superior temporal lesions.

[1]  Steven L. Small,et al.  Repetition Suppression for Spoken Sentences and the Effect of Task Demands , 2006, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[2]  G. Green,et al.  Disorders of human complex sound processing , 1999 .

[3]  Rainer Goebel,et al.  "Who" Is Saying "What"? Brain-Based Decoding of Human Voice and Speech , 2008, Science.

[4]  A. Samuel.  Lexical Activation Produces Potent Phonemic Percepts , 1997, Cognitive Psychology.

[5]  Elia Formisano,et al.  The functional neuroanatomy of metrical stress evaluation of perceived and imagined spoken words. , 2004, Cerebral cortex.

[6]  Jeffrey R. Binder,et al.  Attentional and linguistic interactions in speech perception , 2008, NeuroImage.

[7]  M. Denis,et al.  Functional Anatomy of Spatial Mental Imagery Generated from Verbal Instructions , 1996, The Journal of Neuroscience.

[8]  Rajesh Kumar,et al.  A method for removal of global effects from fMRI time series , 2004, NeuroImage.

[9]  Dirk Koester,et al.  Event-related brain potentials during the monitoring of speech errors , 2009, NeuroImage.

[10]  George Sperling,et al.  Phonemic model of short-term auditory memory. , 1968 .

[11]  Guillaume P. Dehaene,et al.  Functional segregation of cortical language areas by sentence repetition , 2006, Human brain mapping.

[12]  P. Matthews,et al.  Defining a left-lateralized response specific to intelligible speech using fMRI. , 2003, Cerebral cortex.

[13]  Gerry Stefanatos1.  Speech Perceived through a Damaged Temporal Window: Lessons from Word Deafness and Aphasia , 2008, Seminars in speech and language.

[14]  S. Blumstein,et al.  An Event-Related fMRI Investigation of Implicit Semantic Priming , 2003, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[15]  R. Henson,et al.  Priming, response learning and repetition suppression , 2008, Neuropsychologia.

[16]  C. Price,et al.  Speech-specific auditory processing: where is it? , 2005, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[17]  D. Poeppel,et al.  The cortical organization of speech processing , 2007, Nature Reviews Neuroscience.

[18]  David Poeppel,et al.  Pure word deafness and the bilateral processing of the speech code , 2001, Cogn. Sci..

[19]  Kayoko Okada,et al.  Identification of lexical–phonological networks in the superior temporal sulcus using functional magnetic resonance imaging , 2006, Neuroreport.

[20]  Marco Iacoboni,et al.  Neural responses to non-native phonemes varying in producibility: Evidence for the sensorimotor nature of speech perception , 2006, NeuroImage.

[21]  Steven L. Small,et al.  Abstract Coding of Audiovisual Speech: Beyond Sensory Representation , 2007, Neuron.

[22]  Karl J. Friston,et al.  Hearing and saying. The functional neuro-anatomy of auditory word processing. , 1996, Brain : a journal of neurology.

[23]  Lisa D. Sanders,et al.  Local and global auditory processing: Behavioral and ERP evidence , 2007, Neuropsychologia.

[24]  Thomas J. Grabowski,et al.  The Left Posterior Superior Temporal Gyrus Participates Specifically in Accessing Lexical Phonology , 2008, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[25]  R. Peereman,et al.  Lexical competition in phonological priming: Assessing the role of phonological match and mismatch lengths between primes and targets , 2003, Memory & cognition.

[26]  K. Kiehl,et al.  Detection of Sounds in the Auditory Stream: Event-Related fMRI Evidence for Differential Activation to Speech and Nonspeech , 2001, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[27]  David Poeppel,et al.  Visual speech speeds up the neural processing of auditory speech. , 2005, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[28]  D. Poeppel,et al.  Speech perception at the interface of neurobiology and linguistics , 2008, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

[29]  A. Samuel,et al.  Lexical inhibition and sublexical facilitation are surprisingly long lasting. , 2007, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[30]  A. Liberman,et al.  Parametrically Dissociating Speech and Nonspeech Perception in the Brain Using fMRI , 2001, Brain and Language.

[31]  D Yves von Cramon,et al.  Distinct fMRI responses to laughter, speech, and sounds along the human peri-sylvian cortex. , 2005, Brain research. Cognitive brain research.

[32]  K. Grill-Spector,et al.  Repetition and the brain: neural models of stimulus-specific effects , 2006, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[33]  Alan C. Evans,et al.  Lateralization of phonetic and pitch discrimination in speech processing. , 1992, Science.

[34]  John D. E. Gabrieli,et al.  Neural Correlates of Auditory Repetition Priming: Reduced fMRI Activation in the Auditory Cortex , 2004, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[35]  A. Baddeley.  The Influence of Acoustic and Semantic Similarity on Long-term Memory for Word Sequences , 1966, The Quarterly journal of experimental psychology.

[36]  G. Chételat,et al.  Spoken Word Memory Traces within the Human Auditory Cortex Revealed by Repetition Priming and Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging , 2008, The Journal of Neuroscience.

[37]  J. Rauschecker,et al.  Maps and streams in the auditory cortex: nonhuman primates illuminate human speech processing , 2009, Nature Neuroscience.

[38]  Jonas Obleser,et al.  Bilateral Speech Comprehension Reflects Differential Sensitivity to Spectral and Temporal Features , 2008, The Journal of Neuroscience.

[39]  Karl J. Friston,et al.  Distribution of cortical neural networks involved in word comprehension and word retrieval. , 1991, Brain : a journal of neurology.

[40]  A. Syrota,et al.  The Cortical Representation of Speech , 1993, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[41]  Roy D. Patterson,et al.  Locating the initial stages of speech–sound processing in human temporal cortex , 2006, NeuroImage.

[42]  Emily B. Myers,et al.  An event-related fMRI investigation of phonological–lexical competition , 2006, Neuropsychologia.

[43]  Robert J. Zatorre,et al.  Bilingual brain organization: A functional magnetic resonance adaptation study , 2006, NeuroImage.

[44]  J. Binder,et al.  Functional magnetic resonance imaging of human auditory cortex , 1994, Annals of neurology.

[45]  P. D. Eimas,et al.  Selective adaptation of linguistic feature detectors , 1973 .

[46]  Robert J Zatorre,et al.  Neural specializations for speech and pitch: moving beyond the dichotomies , 2008, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.