Linguistic modulation of the neural encoding of phonemes

Speech comprehension entails the neural mapping of the acoustic speech signal onto learned linguistic units. This acousto-linguistic transformation is bi-directional, whereby higher-level linguistic processes (e.g., semantics) modulate the acoustic analysis of individual linguistic units. Here, we investigated the cortical topography and linguistic modulation of the most fundamental linguistic unit, the phoneme. We presented natural speech and ‘phoneme quilts’ (pseudo-randomly shuffled phonemes) in either a familiar (English) or unfamiliar (Korean) language to native English speakers while recording fMRI. This allowed us to dissociate the contribution of acoustic vs. linguistic processes towards phoneme analysis. We show that (1) the acoustic analysis of phonemes is modulated by linguistic analysis and (2) that for this modulation both of acoustic and phonetic information need to be incorporated. These results suggest that the linguistic modulation of cortical sensitivity to phoneme classes minimizes prediction error during natural speech perception, thereby aiding speech comprehension in challenging listening situations.