My year in sci­ence 2008 finds a sat­is­fy­ing end­ing by see­ing the fruits of my col­league Dr. Frank Eisner’s (cur­rent­ly ICN / UCL) and my own year­long efforts online.

Our opin­ion piece on how the prob­lem of pre-lex­i­cal abstrac­tion of speech in struc­tures of the audi­to­ry cor­tex should be best approached is final­ly avail­able as a beau­ti­ful and handy pre-print from Trends in Cog­ni­tive Sci­ences.

As a goody, I quote from the con­clu­sions rather than the open­ly avail­able abstract:

‘Behav­iour­al inves­ti­ga­tions in speech sci­ences and com­pu­ta­tion­al mod­el­ling have led to a detailed under­stand­ing of how the speech per­cep­tion sys­tem can be con­cep­tu­alised. While this type of research can­not by itself pro­duce a neu­roanatom­i­cal mod­el of speech pro­cess­ing, it should guide neu­ro­sci­en­tif­ic inves­ti­ga­tions by pro­vid­ing a the­o­ret­i­cal framework.

Using the cog­ni­tive sub­trac­tion method, func­tion­al neu­roimag­ing stud­ies have broad­ly defined the neu­roanato­my of pre-lex­i­cal pro­cess­ing. Mul­ti­vari­ate neu­roimag­ing tech­niques have the poten­tial to study spec­tro-tem­po­ral encod­ing and abstrac­tion of speech in more detail, and cru­cial­ly, in a man­ner that can be relat­ed to results from oth­er fields. […] We sug­gest that the out­put of these mul­ti­vari­ate meth­ods can serve as input to cog­ni­tive mod­els of speech per­cep­tion, in par­al­lel to behav­iour-based like­li­hoods that have been used in speech sci­ence, wave­form-based like­li­hoods that can be extract­ed with auto­mat­ic speech recog­ni­tion tech­niques, or spike-tim­ing pat­terns that have been observed in ani­mal studies.

The inte­gra­tion of find­ings from all of these areas, and the lat­est tech­no­log­i­cal devel­op­ments with­in each of them, can lead to a testable, neu­roanatom­i­cal mod­el of pre-lex­i­cal abstraction.’

Feel free to mail me for reprints.