THE CORTICAL REPRESENTATION OF SPEECH

In this study, we compare regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) while Fr ench monolingual subjects listen to continuous speech in an unknown la nguage, to lists of French words, or to meaningful and distorted stori es in French. Our results show that, in addition to regions devoted to single-word comprehension, processing of meaningful stories activates the left middle temporal gyrus, the left and right temporal poles, an d a superior prefrontal area in the left frontal lobe. Among these reg ions, only the temporal poles remain activated whenever sentences with acceptable syntax and prosody are presented.