Speech is Special and Language is Structured

David Poeppel

Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics

I discuss two new auditory studies that focus on general questions about the cognitive science and neural implementation of speech and language. I come to (currently) unpopular conclusions about both domains. I argue for the existence of a speech-specific processing stage that implicates a particular neuronal substrate that has the appropriate sensitivity and selectivity for speech.

Based on a set of experiments, using MEG, I develop how temporal encoding can form the basis for more abstract, structural processing. The results demonstrate that, during listening to connected speech, cortical activity of different time scales is entrained concurrently to track the time course of linguistic structures at different hierarchical levels. Critically, entrainment to hierarchical linguistic structures is dissociated from the neural encoding of acoustic cues and from processing the predictability of incoming words.

These results demonstrate syntax-driven, internal construction of hierarchical linguistic structure via entrainment of hierarchical cortical dynamics. The conclusions - that speech is special and language syntactic-structure-driven - provide new neurobiological provocations to the prevailing view that speech perception is ‘mere’ hearing and that language comprehension is ‘mere’ statistics.