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Phonological Feature Representations in Auditory Cortex

Although phonemes are the smallest linguistic units that speakers are usually aware of, a good deal of linguistic evidence indicates that sub-phonemic features are the smallest building blocks of language. We present evidence from biomagnetic studies that indicate that representations of discrete phonological feature categories are available to left-hemisphere auditory cortex. Sequences of voiced (/bae, dae, gae/) and voiceless (/pae, tae, kae/) consonants were contrasted in a modified auditory mismatch paradigm. Importantly, although sounds contrasted in a many-to-one ratio at the level of phonological features, the use of 12 acoustically diverse tokens of each category ensured that there was no many-to-one ratio at the acoustic level. Therefore, the fact that an auditory cortex mismatch response was elicited confirms that feature representations are available to this part of the brain. Strikingly, however, the ability of auditory cortex to form a feature-level category from groups of diverse sounds appears to be strongly left-lateralized.