Topography of speech-related acoustic and phonological feature encoding throughout the human core and parabelt auditory cortex

Abstract

Speech perception involves the extraction of acoustic and phonological features from the speech signal. How those features map out across the human auditory cortex is unknown. Complementary to noninvasive imaging, the high spatial and temporal resolution of intracranial recordings has greatly contributed to recent advances in our understanding. However, these approaches are typically limited by piecemeal sampling of the expansive human temporal lobe auditory cortex. Here, we present a functional characterization of local cortical encoding throughout all major regions of the primary and non-primary human auditory cortex. We overcame previous limitations by using rare direct recordings from the surface of the temporal plane after surgical microdissection of the deep Sylvian fissure between the frontal and temporal lobes. We recorded neural responses using simultaneous high-density direct recordings over the left temporal plane and the lateral superior temporal gyrus, while participants listened to natural speech sentences and pure tone stimuli. We found an anatomical separation of simple spectral feature tuning, including tuning for pure tones and absolute pitch, on the superior surface of the temporal plane, and complex tuning for phonological features, relative pitch and speech amplitude modulations on lateral STG. Broadband onset responses are unique to posterior STG and not found elsewhere in auditory cortices. This onset region is functionally distinct from the rest of STG, with latencies similar to primary auditory areas. These findings reveal a new, detailed functional organization of response selectivity to acoustic and phonological features in speech throughout the human auditory cortex.