The Handbook of Speech Perception

By the time they reach these meaning‐representing levels of the brain, the waves of neural activity racing up the auditory pathway will have passed through at least a dozen anatomical processing stations, each composed of between a few hundreds of thousands to hundreds of millions of neurons, each of which is richly and reciprocally interconnected both internally and with the previous and the next levels in the processing hierarchy. We hope readers will share our sense of awe when we consider that it takes a spoken word only a modest fraction of a second to travel through this entire stunningly intricate network to be transformed from sound wave to meaning.

Remember that the picture painted here of a feed‐forward hierarchical network that transforms acoustics to phonetics to semantics is a highly simplified one. It is well grounded in scientific evidence, but it is necessarily a rather selective telling of the story as we understand it to date. Recent years have been a particularly productive time in auditory neuroscience, as insights from animal research, human brain imaging, human patient data and ECoG studies, and artificial intelligence have begun to come together to provide the framework of understanding we have attempted to outline here. But many important details remain unknown, and, while we feel fairly confident that the insights and ideas presented here will stand the test of time, we must be aware that future work may not just complement and refine but even overturn some of the ideas that we currently put forward as our best approximations to the truth. One thing we are absolutely certain of, though, is that studying how human brains speak to each other will remain a profoundly rewarding intellectual pursuit for many years to come.

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