UNLABELLED The laryngeal motor cortex (LMC) is essential for the production of learned vocal behaviors because bilateral damage to this area renders humans unable to speak but has no apparent effect on innate vocalizations such as human laughing and crying or monkey calls. Several hypotheses have been put forward attempting to explain the evolutionary changes from monkeys to humans that potenti...

This study aims to test a prediction of recent theoretical frameworks in speech motor control: if speech production targets are specified in auditory terms, people with better auditory acuity should have more precise speech targets. To investigate this, we had participants perform speech perception and production tasks in a counterbalanced order. To assess speech perception acuity, we used an a...

Neural encoding of tactile features by the somatosensory system serves many important perceptual roles, including texture and object discrimination, feedback for precision grip and manipulation, orofacial motor control speech, gesture, and eating...

Background: The ability to communicate using speech is a remarkable skill, which requires precise coordination of articulatory movements and decoding of complex acoustic signals. According to the traditional view, speech production and perception rely on motor and auditory brain areas, respectively. However, there is growing evidence that auditory-motor circuits support both speech production a...

This paper shows how an articulatory model, able to produce acoustic signals from articulatory motion, can learn to speak, i.e. coordinate its movements in such a way that it utters meaningful sequences of sounds belonging to a given language. This complex learning procedure is accomplished in four major steps: (a) a babbling phase, where the device builds up a model of the forward transforms, ...

The debate about the causal role of the motor system in speech perception has been reignited by demonstrations that motor processes are engaged during the processing of speech sounds. Here, we evaluate which aspects of auditory speech processing are affected, and which are not, in a stroke patient with dysfunction of the speech motor system. We found that the patient showed a normal phonemic ca...

Progress ha.s been made in comput.ational implementation of speech production based on physiological dat.a. An inverse dynamics model of the speech articulator's l1111sculo-skeletal system. which is the mapping from art.iculator t.rajectories to e\ectromyogl'aphic (EMG) signals, was modeled using the acquired forward dynamics model and temporal (smoot.hness of EMG activation) and range constrai...

The exact nature of the role of Broca's area in control of speech and whether it is exerted at the cognitive or at the motor level is still debated. Intraoperative evidence of a lack of motor responses to direct electrical stimulation (DES) of Broca's area and the observation that its stimulation induces a "speech arrest" without an apparent effect on the ongoing activity of phono-articulatory ...

Citation: Moustafa AA (2015) On the relationship among different motor processes: a computational modeling approach. In a recent study in Neurological Science, Park and colleagues investigated the relationship among gait and speech disorders in patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) (Park et al., 2014). They found that gait disturbance in PD patients correlate with speech problems. Specially, t...