[Source:  Science Daily]

Neuroscientists have discovered how the listening brain scans speech to break it down into syllables. The findings provide for the first time a neural basis for the fundamental atoms of language and insights into our perception of the rhythmic poetry of speech.

For decades, speech neuroscientists have looked for evidence that neurons in auditory brain areas use fluctuations in speech volume to identify the beginnings and ends of syllables — like a lin-guis-tics pro-fes-sor di-a-gram-ming a sen-tence. So far, these efforts have met with little luck.

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