Human Sensorimotor Cortex Control of Directly Measured Vocal Tract Movements during Vowel Production
[2];
[3]
- Univ. of California, San Francisco, CA (United States). Dept. of Neurological Surgery, Center for Integrative Neuroscience, Graduate Program in Neuroscience, and Weill Inst for Neurosciences
- Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States). Biological Systems and Engineering Division; Univ. of California, Berkeley, CA (United States). Helen Wills Neuroscience Inst.
- Univ. of California, San Francisco, CA (United States). Dept. of Neurological Surgery, Center for Integrative Neuroscience, and Weill Inst for Neurosciences
During speech production, we make vocal tract movements with remarkable precision and speed. Our understanding of how the human brain achieves such proficient control is limited, in part due to the challenge of simultaneously acquiring high-resolution neural recordings and detailed vocal tract measurements. To overcome this challenge, we combined ultrasound and video monitoring of the supralaryngeal articulators (lips, jaw, and tongue) with electrocorticographic recordings from the cortical surface of 4 subjects (3 female, 1 male) to investigate how neural activity in the ventral sensory-motor cortex (vSMC) relates to measured articulator movement kinematics (position, speed, velocity, acceleration) during the production of English vowels. We found that high-gamma activity at many individual vSMC electrodes strongly encoded the kinematics of one or more articulators, but less so for vowel formants and vowel identity. Neural population decoding methods further revealed the structure of kinematic features that distinguish vowels. Encoding of articulator kinematics was sparsely distributed across time and primarily occurred during the time of vowel onset and offset. In contrast, encoding was low during the steady-state portion of the vowel, despite sustained neural activity at some electrodes. Significant representations were found for all kinematic parameters, but speed was the most robust. These findings enabled by direct vocal tract monitoring demonstrate novel insights into the representation of articulatory kinematic parameters encoded in the vSMC during speech production.
- Research Organization:
- Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Science (SC)
- Grant/Contract Number:
- AC02-05CH11231
- OSTI ID:
- 1485087
- Journal Information:
- Journal of Neuroscience, Vol. 38, Issue 12; ISSN 0270-6474
- Publisher:
- Society for NeuroscienceCopyright Statement
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
Web of Science
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