On the planum temporale lateralization in suprasegmental speech perception: Evidence from a study investigating behavior, structure, and function

Abstract

This study combines functional and structural magnetic resonance imaging to test the "asymmetric sampling in time" (AST) hypothesis, which makes assertions about the symmetrical and asymmetrical representation of speech in the primary and nonprimary auditory cortex. Twenty-three volunteers participated in this parametric clustered-sparse fMRI study. The availability of slowly changing acoustic cues in spoken sentences was systematically reduced over continuous segments with varying lengths (100, 150, 200, 250 ms) by utilizing local time-reversion. As predicted by the hypothesis, functional lateralization in Heschl's gyrus could not be observed. Lateralization in the planum temporale and posterior superior temporal gyrus shifted towards the right hemisphere with decreasing suprasegmental temporal integrity. Cortical thickness of the planum temporale was automatically measured. Participants with an L > R cortical thickness performed better on the in-scanner auditory pattern-matching task. Taken together, these findings support the AST hypothesis and provide substantial novel insight into the division of labor between left and right nonprimary auditory cortex functions during comprehension of spoken utterances. In addition, the present data yield support for a structural-behavioral relationship in the nonprimary auditory cortex.

Temporal information processing as a basis for auditory comprehension: clinical evidence from aphasic patients

“…), as well as in studies combining structural and functional procedures (Liem et al . ). On the basis of these findings, one might predict that aphasic patients could demonstrate a specific left hemispheric dysfunction that may be manifested by disrupted integration mechanisms operating within a 20–50 ms time window (gamma oscillations).…”

High-frequency neural activity predicts word parsing in ambiguous speech streams

“…It could be argued that the dissociation between HFA and LFO behavior is mainly due to the coarse spatial resolution of MEG analysis and that our findings reflect the combined activity of distinct brain regions that serve dissociable mechanisms. Distinct networks may reflect acoustic processing and linguistic parsing: the neural tracking of fine-grained acoustic features would be restricted to primary auditory cortices (Kubanek et al 2013), whereas that of phonemic or lexical information would take place in higher order regions (e.g., superior temporal sulcus and Broca's areas) specific to speech processing (Boemio et al 2005;Kubanek et al 2013;Liem et al 2014;Overath et al 2015;Zion Golumbic et al 2013) or attentional selection (Besle et al 2011;Zion Golumbic et al 2013). In other words, MEG data reported in this study may at once capture stimulus-tracking mechanisms in auditory cortices and cortical oscillators for speech parsing in higher order auditory areas (Overath et al 2015).…”

Bridging the brain structure—brain function gap in prosodic speech processing in older adults

“…Prosodic speech processing has repeatedly been associated with the integrity of right auditory-related areas in younger adults (Geiser et al, 2008;Hurschler et al, 2013;Liem et al, 2014;Meyer et al, 2002Meyer et al, , 2004Meyer, 2008). Moreover, studies investigating neural correlates of suprasegmental speech processing have often been embedded within the 'asymmetric sampling in time' (AST) framework Poeppel, 2003;Shalom and Poeppel, 2008).…”