Some Aspects of Speech and the Brain

What happens in the brain when humans are producing speech or when they are listening to it? This is the main focus of the book, which includes a collection of 13 articles, written by researchers at some of the foremost European laboratories in the fields of linguistics, phonetics, psychology, cognitive sciences, and neurosciences. The articles review progress achieved over the last twenty years in these areas, and present recent experimental results addressing issues of pre-lexical and semantic processing, brain activity in the perception of voicing, pitch, prosody, and pointing. A large part of the book deals with brain activation in speech and language pathologies: language-related aspects in epilepsy, Parkinson’s disease, dyslexia and stuttering. Other contributions discuss speech acquisition modelling, syllabification and lexical access, and the specificity of speech in relation to other biological motor tasks.