Modular Phoneme Processing in Human Superior Temporal Gyrus

Modular organization is fundamental to cortical processing, but its presence is human association cortex is unknown. We characterized phoneme processing with 128-1024 channel micro-arrays at 50-200μm pitch on superior temporal gyrus of 7 patients. High gamma responses were highly correlated within ∼1.7mm diameter modules, sharply delineated from adjacent modules with distinct time-courses and phoneme-selectivity. We suggest that receptive language cortex may be organized in discrete processing modules.