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The brain’s speech centre responds to universal and specific features of language

More than 7,000 languages are spoken around the world, but the human brain becomes highly specialized to process speech in an individual’s own language. Recordings from human brains reveal the shared and language-specific neural mechanisms that arise in the superior temporal gyrus to achieve this feat.

This is a summary of: Bhaya-Grossman, I. et al. Shared and language-specific phonological processing in the human temporal lobe. Nature https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09748-8 (2025).

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doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-025-03827-6

The figure is published under a CC BY 4.0 licence.

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