{"doi":"10.7554/elife.53051","title":"Transformation of a temporal speech cue to a spatial neural code in human auditory cortex","abstract":"In speech, listeners extract continuously-varying spectrotemporal cues from the acoustic signal to perceive discrete phonetic categories. Spectral cues are spatially encoded in the amplitude of responses in phonetically-tuned neural populations in auditory cortex. It remains unknown whether similar neurophysiological mechanisms encode temporal cues like voice-onset time (VOT), which distinguishes sounds like / b / and/ p /. We used direct brain recordings in humans to investigate the neural encoding of temporal speech cues with a VOT continuum from / ba / to / pa /. We found that distinct neural populations respond preferentially to VOTs from one phonetic category, and are also sensitive to sub-phonetic VOT differences within a population’s preferred category. In a simple neural network model, simulated populations tuned to detect either temporal gaps or coincidences between spectral cues captured encoding patterns observed in real neural data. These results demonstrate that a spatial/amplitude neural code underlies the cortical representation of both spectral and temporal speech cues.","journal":"eLife","year":2020,"id":96044,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":35,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9476,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2020-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":413753,"name":"Matthew K. Leonard","orcid":"0000-0002-8530-880X","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":476701,"name":"Matthias J. Sjerps","orcid":"0000-0003-3098-7152","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":233106,"name":"Edward F. Chang","orcid":"0000-0003-2480-4700","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":476700,"name":"Neal P. Fox","orcid":"0000-0003-0298-3664","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":121,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-18T22:34:34.781847Z","pmid":"32840483","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}