Neural Dynamics in Speech Processing: Properties, Specificity and Open Questions
Benedikt Zoefel, Anne Kösem · 2022
Human speech is a particularly relevant acoustic stimulus for our species, due to its role of information transmission during communication. Speech is inherently a dynamic signal, and a recent line of research focused on neural activity following the temporal structure of speech. We review findings that characterise neural dynamics in speech processing and compare them with temporal aspects in human speech. We highlight properties and constraints that both neural and speech dynamics have, suggesting that auditory neural systems are optimised to process human speech. We then discuss the speech-specificity of neural dynamics and their potential mechanistic origins, and summarise open questions in the field.