据11月7日的《科学》（Science）杂志报道说，人们会在任何地方识别出一个他们所爱的人的声音，但这是怎么做到的呢？人脑是如何断定他们所听到的是谁的声音并从听到的话来辨别该声音的呢？荷兰研究人员发现了脑的可帮助聆听者对语音和说话者身份进行解码的有关信号（这两者都来自一个单一的声音流），距离找到这些问题的答案已经更加接近。
Elia Formisano及其同事应用功能性核磁共振成像术来监控自愿者听觉皮层的活动，这些自愿者会聆听录自三个不同说话者的3个元音的声音。研究人员接着用一种数据挖掘的运算法则来分析这些数据中出现的模式。研究人员报告说，无论说话者是谁，与某一元音相关的模式都是相同的，而且无论某特别语音是什么，与某说话者相关的模式也保持相同的状态。这些结果还显示，听觉皮层与语音和说话者的身份的识别有部分的关系，这一发现挑战了一种被广泛认可的假设，即这一过程仅仅发生于专门化的、更高水平的脑区域。（生物谷Bioon.com）
生物谷推荐原始出处：
Science，Vol. 322. no. 5903, pp. 970 - 973，Elia Formisano，Rainer Goebel
"Who" Is Saying "What"? Brain-Based Decoding of Human Voice and Speech
Elia Formisano,* Federico De Martino, Milene Bonte, Rainer Goebel
Can we decipher speech content ("what" is being said) and speaker identity ("who" is saying it) from observations of brain activity of a listener? Here, we combine functional magnetic resonance imaging with a data-mining algorithm and retrieve what and whom a person is listening to from the neural fingerprints that speech and voice signals elicit in the listener's auditory cortex. These cortical fingerprints are spatially distributed and insensitive to acoustic variations of the input so as to permit the brain-based recognition of learned speech from unknown speakers and of learned voices from previously unheard utterances. Our findings unravel the detailed cortical layout and computational properties of the neural populations at the basis of human speech recognition and speaker identification.
Department of Cognitive Neuroscience, Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of Maastricht, 6200 MD Maastricht, Netherlands.
