A groundbreaking study has revealed that Heschl’s gyrus, a region once thought to only process sound, plays a crucial role in interpreting speech melody, or prosody. Researchers tracked brain activity in epilepsy patients with implanted electrodes and found that this region encodes pitch accents as meaningful linguistic signals, separate from word sounds.
This discovery challenges long-held assumptions that prosody processing occurs later in the brain and suggests that humans uniquely extract meaning from pitch variations. The findings could improve speech therapy, AI voice recognition, and our understanding of language disorders.
The study, conducted by Northwestern University, the University of Pittsburgh, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, used intracerebral recordings to investigate prosody processing in narrative speech. Researchers found that Heschl’s gyrus processes subtle changes in pitch, transforming them into meaningful linguistic information that guides how humans understand emphasis, intent, and focus in conversation.
The study’s findings have significant implications for various fields, including speech rehabilitation, AI-powered voice assistants, and our understanding of human communication. The unique role of linguistic experience in processing pitch accents was also highlighted, as non-human primates lack this ability.
These results redefine our understanding of the architecture of speech perception and highlight the importance of early prosodic processing. By unlocking the hidden layer of speech, researchers have discovered how the brain processes pitch accents, revealing profound implications for various fields.
Source: https://neurosciencenews.com/speech-melody-meaning-28452