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Science 7 November 2008:
Vol. 322. no. 5903, pp. 970 - 973
DOI: 10.1126/science.1164318
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Reports

"Who" Is Saying "What"? Brain-Based Decoding of Human Voice and Speech

Elia Formisano,* Federico De Martino, Milene Bonte, Rainer Goebel

Can we decipher speech content ("what" is being said) and speaker identity ("who" is saying it) from observations of brain activity of a listener? Here, we combine functional magnetic resonance imaging with a data-mining algorithm and retrieve what and whom a person is listening to from the neural fingerprints that speech and voice signals elicit in the listener's auditory cortex. These cortical fingerprints are spatially distributed and insensitive to acoustic variations of the input so as to permit the brain-based recognition of learned speech from unknown speakers and of learned voices from previously unheard utterances. Our findings unravel the detailed cortical layout and computational properties of the neural populations at the basis of human speech recognition and speaker identification.

Department of Cognitive Neuroscience, Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of Maastricht, 6200 MD Maastricht, Netherlands.

* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: e.formisano{at}psychology.unimaas.nl

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THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN CITED BY OTHER ARTICLES:
Expertise with Artificial Nonspeech Sounds Recruits Speech-Sensitive Cortical Regions.
R. Leech, L. L. Holt, J. T. Devlin, and F. Dick (2009)
J. Neurosci. 29, 5234-5239
   Abstract »    Full Text »    PDF »
Dynamic and Task-Dependent Encoding of Speech and Voice by Phase Reorganization of Cortical Oscillations.
M. Bonte, G. Valente, and E. Formisano (2009)
J. Neurosci. 29, 1699-1706
   Abstract »    Full Text »    PDF »


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