Mind-Brain Lecture: Christian A. Kell (Frankfurt a.M.)

“What lateralizes speech processing? Contributions of the left and the right cerebral hemisphere to speech perception and production”

In cooperation with ZAS.
Host: Manfred Krifka Clinical observations suggest that the left hemisphere is specialized in producing verbal output while both hemispheres understand speech. This is surprising given that the articulators are represented bilaterally which suggests that the left speech network has an advantage over its contralateral homologue when associating communicative auditory goals with the appropriate motor gestures. My group investigates the sensorimotor interactions underlying overt articulation using fMRI, MEG, and ECog. We hypothesize that phonematic processing in the dorsal auditory stream benefits from rapid and efficient auditory-motor mapping in the left hemisphere. This would privilege the left hemisphere during speech acquisition. Live-long training should thus result in a leftward bias for speech processing. The right hemisphere could contribute in control of prosody given that speech melody-related computations rely on slower temporal scales. In my talk, I will present physiological data in support of this idea but also discuss the consequences of disturbed sensorimotor interactions in developmental stuttering and Parkinson’s disease.

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