What happens in the brain when humans are producing speech or when they are listening to it? This is the main focus of the book, which includes a collection of 13 articles, written by researchers at some of the foremost European laboratories in the fields of linguistics, phonetics, psychology, cognitive sciences, and neurosciences. The articles review progress achieved over the last twenty years in these areas, and present recent experimental results addressing issues of pre-lexical and semantic processing, brain activity in the perception of voicing, pitch, prosody, and pointing. A large part of the book deals with brain activation in speech and language pathologies: language-related aspects in epilepsy, Parkinson's disease, dyslexia and stuttering. Other contributions discuss speech acquisition modelling, syllabification and lexical access, and the specificity of speech in relation to other biological motor tasks.

Contents:

Ingrid Hoonhorst, Cécile Colin, Emily Markessis, Monique Radeau, Paul Deltenre, Willy Serniclaes: N100 component: An electrophysiological cue of voicing perception

Grzegorz Dogil, Giuseppina Rota: Direct brain-feedback and prosody processing

Bernd J. Kröger, Jim Kannampuzha, Anja Lowit, Christiane Neuschaefer-Rube: Phonetotopy within a neurocomputational model of speech production and speech acquisition

Monica Baciu, Emilie Cousin: Some aspects of language plasticity in epileptic patients as assessed by functional MRI

Serge Pinto, Gaelle Fillatre, Alain Ghio: Functional neuroimaging of speech production in Parkinson's disease: Towards a better understanding of dysarthria physiopathology

Sylviane Valdois, Carole Peyrin, Monica Baciu: The neurobiological correlates of developmental dyslexia

Martin Sommer, Nicole Spindler, Kathrin Knappmeyer, Evke Jane Hunter, Veronika Gutmann, Alexander Wolff von Gudenberg/Walter Paulus: Brain imaging and cortical excitability in persistent developmental stuttering

Uta Noppeney: The sensory-motor theory of semantics: Evidence from functional imaging

Hélène Loevenbruck, Marion Dohen, Coriandre Vilain: Pointing is "special"

Rudolph Sock, Béatrice Vaxelaire: How special is speech?

Georg Meyer, Sophie Wuerger, Elvira Perez: Pre-lexical speech processing in the brain

Adriana Hanulíková: The role of syllabification in the lexical segmentation of German and Slovak

Barbara Gili Fivela: From production to perception and back: An analysis of two pitch accents