Extracting Language Content from Speech Sounds: The Information Theoretic Approach

Speech comprehension involves recovering a speaker’s intended meaning from the speech sounds that they produce. While sensory-driven components of this process have been widely investigated, impact content (i.e., linguistic information) on sensory processing is much less understood. Here we summarize growing body research demonstrating neural influenced by morpheme- and word-level statistical properties information conveyed. We introduce review evidence theoretic measures such as entropy surprisal are apparent in responses. These findings help uncover fundamental organizational principles language system: what units stored how accessed. Modeling sensitivity to signal helps explain interface between (i) auditory processes operating (ii) words meanings those convey.