Subcortical responses to music and speech are alike while cortical responses diverge.

Music and speech are encountered daily and are unique to human beings. Both are transformed by the auditory pathway from an initial acoustical encoding to higher level cognition. Studies of cortex have revealed distinct brain responses to music and speech, but differences may emerge in the cortex or may be inherited from different subcortical encoding.

Performance in an Audiovisual Selective Attention Task Using Speech-Like Stimuli Depends on the Talker Identities, But Not Temporal Coherence.

Audiovisual integration of speech can benefit the listener by not only improving comprehension of what a talker is saying but also helping a listener select a particular talker's voice from a mixture of sounds. Binding, an early integration of auditory and visual streams that helps an observer allocate attention to a combined audiovisual object, is likely involved in processing audiovisual speech. Although temporal coherence of stimulus features across sensory modalities has been implicated as an important cue for non-speech stimuli (Maddox et al.

Independent mechanisms of temporal and linguistic cue correspondence benefiting audiovisual speech processing.

It is well established that in order to comprehend speech in noisy environments, listeners use the face of the talker in conjunction with the auditory speech. Yet how listeners use audiovisual speech correspondences along the multisensory speech processing pathway is not known. We engaged listeners in a pair of experiments using face rotation to partially dissociate linguistic and temporal information and two tasks to assess both overall integration and early integration specifically.

Task-uninformative visual stimuli improve auditory spatial discrimination in humans but not the ideal observer.

In order to survive and function in the world, we must understand the content of our environment. This requires us to gather and parse complex, sometimes conflicting, information. Yet, the brain is capable of translating sensory stimuli from disparate modalities into a cohesive and accurate percept with little conscious effort.

Prosodic pitch processing is represented in delta-band EEG and is dissociable from the cortical tracking of other acoustic and phonetic features.

Speech is central to communication among humans. Meaning is largely conveyed by the selection of linguistic units such as words, phrases and sentences. However, prosody, that is the variation of acoustic cues that tie linguistic segments together, adds another layer of meaning.