Decoding the Cortical Dynamics of Sound-Meaning Mapping.

Understanding spoken words involves complex processes that transform the auditory input into a meaningful interpretation. This effortless transition occurs on millisecond timescales, with remarkable speed and accuracy and without any awareness of the complex computations involved. Here, we reveal the real-time neural dynamics of these processes by collecting data about listeners' brain activity as they hear spoken words. Using novel statistical models of different aspects of the recognition process, we can locate directly which parts of the brain are accessing the stored form and meaning of words and how the competition between different word candidates is resolved neurally in real time. This gives us a uniquely differentiated picture of the neural substrate for the first 500 ms of word recognition.