Poeppel, D.
New York University
Three neurobiological concepts are discussed. First, the functional anatomy underlying speech sound processing is a distributed cortical system that includes regions along at least two processing streams. This anatomic fractionation supports models that posit a componential architecture for speech. Second, to facilitate the processing along these different pathways, sound is analyzed in temporal ‘chunks’ that permit the appropriate computations in these pathways. Neurobiological studies suggest that there exist privileged time scales that lie at the basis of temporally organizing the input signals. Third, processing along the different pathways and over the distinct time scales incorporates a predictive component in the context of feedforward and feedback processing. Most (useful) attributes we know about speech derive from psychological studies. These three cognitive neuroscience ideas provide a (maybe useful) neurobiological perspective to understand the implementation of speech processing in the human brain.