Speech perception is thought to rely on a cortical feedforward serial transformation of acoustic into linguistic representations. Using intracranial recordings across the entire human auditory cortex, electrocortical stimulation, and surgical ablation, we show that cortical processing across areas is not consistent with a serial hierarchical organization. Instead, response latency and receptive field analyses demonstrate parallel and distinct information processing in the primary and nonprimary auditory cortices. This functional dissociation was also observed where stimulation of the primary auditory cortex evokes auditory hallucination but does not distort or interfere with speech perception. Opposite effects were observed during stimulation of nonprimary cortex in superior temporal gyrus. Ablation of the primary auditory cortex does not affect speech perception. These results establish a distributed functional organization of parallel information processing throughout the human auditory cortex and demonstrate an essential independent role for nonprimary auditory cortex in speech processing.

语音感知被认为依赖于皮层前馈序列将声学转换为语言表征。我们使用跨整个人类听觉皮层、皮层电刺激和手术消融的颅内记录，表明跨区域的皮层处理与串行层次结构不一致。相反，响应延迟和感受野分析表明初级和非初级听觉皮层中的并行和不同的信息处理。在初级听觉皮层的刺激引起幻听但不会扭曲或干扰语音感知的情况下，也观察到这种功能分离。在颞上回刺激非初级皮层时观察到相反的效果。初级听觉皮层的消融不会影响言语感知。这些结果在整个人类听觉皮层建立了并行信息处理的分布式功能组织，并证明了非初级听觉皮层在语音处理中的重要独立作用。