Phonetic Feature Encoding in Human Superior Temporal Gyrus

Deciphering Language Consonants and vowels represent basic building blocks of human language. How their characteristics are extracted from acoustic speech input is not well understood. Directly recording from the superior temporal gyrus of patients as part of their clinical evaluation for epilepsy surgery, Mesgarani et al. (p. 1006 , published online 30 January; see the Perspective by Grodzinsky and Nelken ) investigated neural responses while the subjects listened to continuous speech. The findings reveal how both vowels and consonants of different phonetic categories are encoded.