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You have in all probability heard the phrase, “It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it,” and now, science backs it up. A primary-of-its-kind research from Northwestern College’s Faculty of Communication, the College of Pittsburgh and the College of Wisconsin-Madison reveals a area of the mind, lengthy recognized for early auditory processing, performs a far larger position in deciphering speech than beforehand understood.
The multidisciplinary research revealed in Nature Communications discovered a mind area often known as Heschl’s gyrus would not simply course of sounds—it transforms refined modifications in pitch, often known as prosody, into significant linguistic data that guides how people perceive emphasis, intent and focus in dialog.
For years, scientists believed that each one facets of prosody had been primarily processed within the superior temporal gyrus, a mind area recognized for speech notion.
Bharath Chandrasekaran, the research’s co-principal investigator and professor and chair of the Roxelyn and Richard Pepper Division of Communication Sciences and Problems at Northwestern, mentioned the findings problem long-held assumptions about how, the place and the velocity at which prosody is processed within the mind.
“The results redefine our understanding of the architecture of speech perception,” Chandrasekaran mentioned. “We’ve spent a few decades researching the nuances of how speech is abstracted in the brain, but this is the first study to investigate how subtle variations in pitch that also communicate meaning is processed in the brain.”
Uncommon set of analysis contributors
Chandrasekaran partnered with Dr. Taylor Abel, chief of pediatric neurosurgery on the College of Pittsburgh Faculty of Drugs, to check auditory data processing in 11 adolescent sufferers who had been receiving neurosurgery remedy for extreme epilepsy. All of them had electrodes implanted deep within the cortex of the mind that’s vital for key language perform.
“Typically, communication and linguistics research relies on non-invasive recordings from the surface of the skin, which makes it accessible but not very precise,” Abel mentioned. “A collaboration between neurosurgeon-scientists and neuroscientists, like ours, allowed us to collect high-quality recordings of brain activity that would not have been possible otherwise, and learn about the mechanisms of brain processing in a completely new way.”
To discover how the mind deciphers the melody of speech, researchers labored with the uncommon group of sufferers who had electrodes implanted of their brains as a part of epilepsy remedy. Whereas these sufferers actively listened to an audiobook recording of “Alice in Wonderland,” scientists tracked exercise in a number of mind areas in actual time.
Utilizing the intracerebral recordings from the electrodes deep within the affected person’s mind, researchers famous the Heschl’s gyrus part processed refined modifications in voice pitch—not simply as sound, however as significant linguistic models. The mind encoded pitch accents individually from the sounds that make up phrases.
“Our study challenges the long-standing assumptions of how and where the brain picks up on the natural melody in speech—those subtle pitch changes that help convey meaning and intent,” mentioned G. Nike Gnanateja of UW-Madison’s Division of Communication Sciences and Problems and co-first creator of the research.
“Even though these pitch patterns vary each time we speak, our brains create stable representations to understand them.”
Gnanateja says the analysis additionally revealed that the hidden layer of that means carried by prosodic contours—the rise and fall of speech—is encoded a lot earlier in auditory processing than beforehand thought.
Related analysis was performed in non-human primates, however researchers discovered these brains lacked this abstraction, regardless of processing the identical acoustic cues.
By unlocking the hidden layer of speech, Chandrasekaran and his crew found how the mind processes pitch accents, revealing profound implications for numerous fields.
“Our findings could transform speech rehabilitation, AI-powered voice assistants, and our understanding of what makes human communication unique,” he mentioned.
Understanding early prosodic processing may result in new interventions for speech and language problems, equivalent to autism, dysprosody in sufferers who’ve had a stroke, and language-based studying variations.
The research additionally highlights the distinctive position of linguistic expertise in human communication, as non-human primates lack the flexibility to course of pitch accents as summary classes.
Moreover, these findings may considerably improve AI-driven voice recognition techniques by enabling them to higher deal with prosody, bringing pure language processing nearer to mimicking human speech notion.
Extra data:
Cortical processing of discrete prosodic patterns in steady speech, Nature Communications (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-025-56779-w
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Northwestern College
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It is not simply what you say—it is also the way you say it: How the mind decodes modifications within the pitch of speech (2025, March 3)
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