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Researchers Find Brain Area that Integrates Speech's Rhythms

[Source:  Science Daily]

mriscan

Duke and MIT scientists have discovered an area of the brain that is sensitive to the timing of speech, a crucial element of spoken language.

Timing matters to the structure of human speech. For example, phonemes are the shortest, most basic unit of speech and last an average of 30 to 60 milliseconds. By comparison, syllables take longer: 200 to 300 milliseconds. Most whole words are longer still.
In order to understand speech, the brain needs to somehow integrate this rapidly evolving information.
The auditory system, like other sensory systems, likely takes shortcuts to cope with the onslaught of information — by, for example, sampling information in chunks similar in length to that of an average consonant or syllable, says study co-author Tobias Overath, an assistant research professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke. The other corresponding author is Josh McDermott from MIT.
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