Cortical processing of discrete prosodic patterns in continuous speech.

ABSTRACT: Prosody has a vital function in speech, structuring a speaker's intended message for the listener. The superior temporal gyrus (STG) is considered a critical hub for prosody, but the role of earlier auditory regions like Heschl's gyrus (HG), associated with pitch processing, remains unclear. Using intracerebral recordings in humans and non-human primate models, we investigated prosody processing in narrative speech, focusing on pitch accents-abstract phonological units that signal word prominence and communicative intent. In humans, HG encoded pitch accents as abstract representations beyond spectrotemporal features, distinct from segmental speech processing, and outperforms STG in disambiguating pitch accents. Multivariate models confirm HG's unique representation of pitch accent categori

SUBMITTER: Gnanateja GN 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11876672 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature