Is the brain capable of distinguishing a voice from the specific sounds it utters? In an attempt to answer this question, researchers from the University of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland, – in collaboration with the University of Maastricht, the Netherlands—devised pseudo-words (words without meaning) spoken by three voices with different pitches. Their aim? To observe how the brain processes this information when it focuses either on the voice or on speech sounds (i.e. phonemes). The scientists discovered that the auditory cortex amplifies different aspects of the sounds, depending on what task is being performed. Voice-specific information is prioritised for voice differentiation, while phoneme-specific information is important for the differentiation of speech sounds. The results, which are published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, shed light on the cerebral mechanisms involved in speech processing.
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