Neurophonetics

Neurophonetics studies neural bases of speech production and perception. Speech production starts with a proposition that is transformed into a verbal message by a series of pragmatic and language-specific rules and constraints, to be finally articulated with the help of motor control mechanisms and auditory feedback loop and monitoring processes. Speech perception involves auditory encoding of phonological features as a step in lexical access and comprehension of the message within the perception–memory–action loop. Just as the boundary between the more general fields of phonetics and linguistics is blurry, the area where neurophonetics and neurolinguistics meet is gray and some overlap is to be expected. There seems to be general agreement that neurophonetics covers acoustic, phonetic, and phonological aspects of speech processing to the level of ...