The processing of spoken language has been attributed to areas in the superior temporal lobe, where speech stimuli elicit the greatest activation. However, neurobiological and psycholinguistic models have long postulated that knowledge about the articulatory features of individual phonemes has an important role in their perception and in speech comprehension. To probe the possible involvement o...

Lesion-symptom mapping studies reveal that selective damage to one or more components of the speech production network can be associated with foreign accent syndrome, changes in regional accent (e.g., from Parisian accent to Alsatian accent), stronger regional accent, or re-emergence of a previously learned and dormant regional accent. Here, we report loss of regional accent after rapidly regre...

BACKGROUND Hearing ability is essential for normal speech development, however the precise mechanisms linking auditory input and the improvement of speaking ability remain poorly understood. Auditory feedback during speech production is believed to play a critical role by providing the nervous system with information about speech outcomes that is used to learn and subsequently fine-tune speech ...

The perception of co-speech gestures, i.e., hand movements that co-occur with speech, has been investigated by several studies. The results show that the perception of co-speech gestures engages a core set of frontal, temporal, and parietal areas. However, no study has yet investigated the neural processes underlying the production of co-speech gestures. Specifically, it remains an open questio...

Learning of temporal sequences is a topic of research in such different areas as speech and other temporal pattern recognition as well as motor control (for a survey see e.g. Mozer, 1993). In this paper an approach is presented which is particularly suitable for motor control due to the fact that it does not only reproduce temporal sequences in exactly the way they where learned but it is able ...

Fluent speech production requires rapid coordination among respiratory, laryngeal, and articulatory processes and is mediated by multiple neural systems (Bohland & Guenther, 2006). Stuttering is a fluency disorder characterized by core deficits in speech motor planning. Previous research indicates people who stutter (PWS) exhibit deficits in speech motor sequence learning and are slower and les...

The hypoglossal motor neurons that innervate the vocal organ (syrinx) of the male zebra finch show a selective, long-latency (50-millisecond) response to sound. This response is eliminated by lesions to forebrain song-control nuclei. Different song syllables elicit a response from different syringeal motor neurons. Conspecific vocalizations may therefore be perceived as members of a set of voca...

Acquired and developmental apraxia of speech (AOS and DAS) are defined as disorders of the transition from an abstract phonological code into motor commands. However, the natural course of these disorders differs substantially because of the fundamental difference in the developmental stage at which the apraxia expresses itself. In normal and pathological development alike, development of langu...

Childhood hearing impairment is a common chronic condition that may have a major impact on acquisition of speech, social and physical development. Numerous literature states that injury to the vestibular organs may result in accompanying balance and motor development disorders. But still postural control and motor assessments are not a routine procedure in hearing impaired children. Hence, we a...

PURPOSE Speech and other oral functions such as swallowing have been compared and contrasted with oral behaviors variously labeled quasispeech, paraspeech, speechlike, and nonspeech, all of which overlap to some degree in neural control, muscles deployed, and movements performed. Efforts to understand the relationships among these behaviors are hindered by the lack of explicit and widely accept...