Читать книгу The Handbook of Speech Perception - Группа авторов - Страница 45

All the systems that we have reviewed so far on our journey along the auditory pathway have been general auditory‐processing systems. So, although they are important for speech processing, their function is not speech specific. For example, the cochlea converts pressure waves into electrical impulses, whether the pressure waves are encoding a friendly ‘hello’ or the sound of falling rain; the subcortical pathways process and propagate these neural signals to the primary auditory cortex, regardless of whether they are encoding a phone conversation, barking dogs, or noisy traffic; and the primary auditory cortex exhibits a tonotopic representation of an auditory stimulus, whether that stimulus is part of a Shakespearean soliloquy or of Ravel’s Boléro. In this section, we encounter a set of cortical areas that preferentially process speech over other kinds of auditory stimuli. We will also describe deeply revealing new work into the linguistic‐phonetic representation of speech, obtained using surgical recordings in human brains.