University of California, San Diego, Linguistics, 9500 Gilman Dr., La Jolla, CA, 92093, USA.
San Diego State University, School of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences, 5500 Campanile Drive, San Diego, CA, 92182, USA.
Nat Commun. 2024 Jan 23;15(1):677. doi: 10.1038/s41467-024-44844-9.
Spoken language comprehension requires abstraction of linguistic information from speech, but the interaction between auditory and linguistic processing of speech remains poorly understood. Here, we investigate the nature of this abstraction using neural responses recorded intracranially while participants listened to conversational English speech. Capitalizing on multiple, language-specific patterns where phonological and acoustic information diverge, we demonstrate the causal efficacy of the phoneme as a unit of analysis and dissociate the unique contributions of phonemic and spectrographic information to neural responses. Quantitive higher-order response models also reveal that unique contributions of phonological information are carried in the covariance structure of the stimulus-response relationship. This suggests that linguistic abstraction is shaped by neurobiological mechanisms that involve integration across multiple spectro-temporal features and prior phonological information. These results link speech acoustics to phonology and morphosyntax, substantiating predictions about abstractness in linguistic theory and providing evidence for the acoustic features that support that abstraction.
口语理解需要从言语中抽象出语言信息，但言语的听觉和语言处理之间的相互作用仍未得到很好的理解。在这里，我们使用参与者在听会话英语时记录的颅内神经反应来研究这种抽象的本质。利用多种语言特异性模式，其中语音和声学信息存在差异，我们证明了音位作为分析单位的因果效力，并将音位和频谱信息对神经反应的独特贡献区分开来。定量高阶响应模型还表明，语音信息的独特贡献体现在刺激-反应关系的协方差结构中。这表明语言抽象是由涉及跨多个时频特征和先前语音信息整合的神经生物学机制塑造的。这些结果将言语声学与音韵学和形态句法联系起来，为语言理论中的抽象性预测提供了依据，并为支持这种抽象性的声学特征提供了证据。
