Physiologic acoustic basis of speech perception.

In the past, there has been a distinction between extraction of the auditory parameters of speech and a specialized phonetic speech processor. It was suggested that for the latter, exclusive specialized processing is required by the dominant hemisphere, while the former was handled by the general auditory system shared by both hemispheres. Present research shows that the peculiarity of speech does not lie in its phonologic information but in the acoustic information which the central auditory system processes. It is, therefore, suggested that specialization for the perceptual process extends to the mechanisms by which the acoustic features of speech are extracted and processed.