Purpose: The present study examines the brain basis of listening to spoken words in noise, which is a ubiquitous characteristic of communication, with the focus on the dorsal auditory pathway. Method: English-speaking young adults identified single words in 3 listening conditions while their hemodynamic response was measured using fMRI: speech in…

Spoken language processing in noisy environments, a hallmark of the human brain, is subject to age-related decline, even when peripheral hearing might be intact. The present study examines the cortical cerebral hemodynamics (measured by fMRI) associated with such processing in the aging brain. Younger and older subjects identified single words in…

Brain imaging studies of voice perception often contrast activation from vocal and verbal tasks to identify regions uniquely involved in processing voice. However, such a strategy precludes detection of the functional relationship between speech and voice perception. In a pair of experiments involving identifying voices from native and foreign…