The Temporal Voice Areas are not "just" Speech Areas

Régis Trapeau; Etienne Thoret; Pascal Belin

doi:10.3389/fnins.2022.1075288

The Temporal Voice Areas are not "just" Speech Areas

Front Neurosci. 2023 Jan 4:16:1075288. doi: 10.3389/fnins.2022.1075288. eCollection 2022.

Authors

Régis Trapeau¹, Etienne Thoret^{2

3}, Pascal Belin^{1

4}

Affiliations

¹ La Timone Neuroscience Institute, CNRS and Aix-Marseille University, UMR 7289, Marseille, France.
² Aix-Marseille University, CNRS, UMR7061 PRISM, UMR7020 LIS, Marseille, France.
³ Institute of Language, Communication and the Brain (ILCB), Marseille, France.
⁴ Department of Psychology, Montreal University, Montreal, QC, Canada.

Abstract

The Temporal Voice Areas (TVAs) respond more strongly to speech sounds than to non-speech vocal sounds, but does this make them Temporal "Speech" Areas? We provide a perspective on this issue by combining univariate, multivariate, and representational similarity analyses of fMRI activations to a balanced set of speech and non-speech vocal sounds. We find that while speech sounds activate the TVAs more than non-speech vocal sounds, which is likely related to their larger temporal modulations in syllabic rate, they do not appear to activate additional areas nor are they segregated from the non-speech vocal sounds when their higher activation is controlled. It seems safe, then, to continue calling these regions the Temporal Voice Areas.

Keywords: Temporal Voice Areas; decoding; functional MRI; humans; representational similarity analysis; speech; voice.