Abstract
Speech sound perception is one of the most fascinating tasks performed by the human brain. It involves a mapping from continuous acoustic waveforms onto the discrete phonological units computed to store words in the mental lexicon. In this article, we review the magnetoencephalographic studies that have explored the timing and morphology of the N1m component to investigate how vowels and consonants are computed and represented within the auditory cortex. The neurons that are involved in the N1m act to construct a sensory memory of the stimulus due to spatially and temporally distributed activation patterns within the auditory cortex. Indeed, localization of auditory fields maps in animals and humans suggested two levels of sound coding, a tonotopy dimension for spectral properties and a tonochrony dimension for temporal properties of sounds. When the stimulus is a complex speech sound, tonotopy and tonochrony data may give important information to assess whether the speech sound parsing and decoding are generated by pure bottom-up reflection of acoustic differences or whether they are additionally affected by top-down processes related to phonological categories. Hints supporting pure bottom-up processing coexist with hints supporting top-down abstract phoneme representation. Actually, N1m data (amplitude, latency, source generators, and hemispheric distribution) are limited and do not help to disentangle the issue. The nature of these limitations is discussed. Moreover, neurophysiological studies on animals and neuroimaging studies on humans have been taken into consideration. We compare also the N1m findings with the investigation of the magnetic mismatch negativity (MMNm) component and with the analogous electrical components, the N1 and the MMN. We conclude that N1 seems more sensitive to capture lateralization and hierarchical processes than N1m, although the data are very preliminary. Finally, we suggest that MEG data should be integrated with EEG data in the light of the neural oscillations framework and we propose some concerns that should be addressed by future investigations if we want to closely line up language research with issues at the core of the functional brain mechanisms.
Highlights
Making sense of speech contexts is a challenging task
Such pattern was found in the late N1 activities, at about 150 ms from stimulus onset, and was interpreted assuming that the formant frequencies alone cannot account for the auditory processing of vowels when binary oppositions of distinctive features play a relevant role in contrasting phonemes within a linguistic system
This study found that back vowels (e.g., [u]) were earlier than front vowels (e.g., [y]), and that the features Height and Round affected the timing neuronal strategies resulting in later responses to high (e.g., [i]) than non-high (e.g., [A]) vowels and in faster N1m to unrounded vowels (e.g., [ ]) than to the rounded counterparts (e.g., [u])
Summary
Making sense of speech contexts is a challenging task. The categorization of complex sounds requires the human brain to analyze the acoustic (phonetic) properties and perform computations integrating the analyzed properties into a perceptual (abstract) representation subjected to categorical (phonological) processes. We suggest that MEG and EEG research should be better integrated because EEG seems more sensitive to capture the hierarchy of processing and the lateralization processes of signals We discuss this issue in the light of the neural oscillations framework proposing some important concerns which will should be the subject of future investigation into the field
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