The neural circuits responsible for social communication are among the least understood in the brain. Human studies have made great progress in advancing our understanding of the global computations required for processing speech, and animal models offer the opportunity to discover evolutionarily conserved mechanisms for decoding these signals. In this review article, we describe some of the most well-established speech decoding computations from human studies and describe animal research designed to reveal potential circuit mechanisms underlying these processes. Human and animal brains must perform the challenging tasks of rapidly recognizing, categorizing, and assigning communicative importance to sounds in a noisy environment. The instructions to these functions are found in the precise connections neurons make with one another. Therefore, identifying circuit-motifs in the auditory cortices and linking them to communicative functions is pivotal. We review recent advances in human recordings that have revealed the most basic unit of speech decoded by neurons is a phoneme, and consider circuit-mapping studies in rodents that have shown potential connectivity schemes to achieve this. Finally, we discuss other potentially important processing features in humans like lateralization, sensitivity to fine temporal features, and hierarchical processing. The goal is for animal studies to investigate neurophysiological and anatomical pathways responsible for establishing behavioral phenotypes that are shared between humans and animals. This can be accomplished by establishing cell types, connectivity patterns, genetic pathways and critical periods that are relevant in the development and function of social communication.

中文翻译：

---

在啮齿动物中使用神经回路询问来解开人类语音解码。

负责社交交流的神经回路在大脑中了解最少。人体研究在增进我们对处理语音所需的全局计算的理解方面取得了长足的进步，而动物模型提供了发现解码这些信号的进化保守机制的机会。在这篇评论文章中，我们描述了一些来自人类研究的最完善的语音解码计算，并描述了旨在揭示这些过程背后潜在电路机制的动物研究。人和动物的大脑必须执行具有挑战性的任务，即在嘈杂的环境中快速识别，分类声音并赋予其传播重要性。这些功能的说明可在神经元彼此之间建立的精确联系中找到。因此，识别听觉皮层中的电路基元并将它们与沟通功能联系起来至关重要。我们回顾了人类录音的最新进展，这些发现揭示了神经元解码的最基本语音单位是音素，并考虑了在啮齿动物中进行的电路映射研究，这些研究表明了实现这一目标的潜在连接方案。最后，我们讨论了人类中其他潜在的重要处理特征，例如偏侧化，对精细时间特征的敏感性和分层处理。动物研究的目标是调查负责建立人与动物之间共享的行为表型的神经生理和解剖学途径。这可以通过建立小区类型，连接模式，