Cortical processing of discrete prosodic patterns in continuous speech

Journal article

G. N. Gnanateja, K. Rupp, Fernando Llanos, Jasmine L. Hect, J. German, T. Teichert, Taylor J. Abel, B. Chandrasekaran
Nature Communications, 2025

Semantic Scholar DOI PubMedCentral PubMed

Cite

APA Click to copy
Gnanateja, G. N., Rupp, K., Llanos, F., Hect, J. L., German, J., Teichert, T., … Chandrasekaran, B. (2025). Cortical processing of discrete prosodic patterns in continuous speech. Nature Communications.

Chicago/Turabian Click to copy
Gnanateja, G. N., K. Rupp, Fernando Llanos, Jasmine L. Hect, J. German, T. Teichert, Taylor J. Abel, and B. Chandrasekaran. “Cortical Processing of Discrete Prosodic Patterns in Continuous Speech.” Nature Communications (2025).

MLA Click to copy
Gnanateja, G. N., et al. “Cortical Processing of Discrete Prosodic Patterns in Continuous Speech.” Nature Communications, 2025.

BibTeX Click to copy

@article{g2025a,
  title = {Cortical processing of discrete prosodic patterns in continuous speech},
  year = {2025},
  journal = {Nature Communications},
  author = {Gnanateja, G. N. and Rupp, K. and Llanos, Fernando and Hect, Jasmine L. and German, J. and Teichert, T. and Abel, Taylor J. and Chandrasekaran, B.}
}

Abstract

Prosody has a vital function in speech, structuring a speaker’s intended message for the listener. The superior temporal gyrus (STG) is considered a critical hub for prosody, but the role of earlier auditory regions like Heschl’s gyrus (HG), associated with pitch processing, remains unclear. Using intracerebral recordings in humans and non-human primate models, we investigated prosody processing in narrative speech, focusing on pitch accents—abstract phonological units that signal word prominence and communicative intent. In humans, HG encoded pitch accents as abstract representations beyond spectrotemporal features, distinct from segmental speech processing, and outperforms STG in disambiguating pitch accents. Multivariate models confirm HG’s unique representation of pitch accent categories. In the non-human primate, pitch accents were not abstractly encoded, despite robust spectrotemporal processing, highlighting the role of experience in shaping abstract representations. These findings emphasize a key role for the HG in early prosodic abstraction and advance our understanding of human speech processing. Using intracerebral recordings, the authors find abstract prosodic categories in continuous speech are encoded differently to segmental features by Heschl’s gyrus, suggesting specialized cortical processing early in the auditory processing hierarchy.