Seeing Brains Reading Speech: A Review and Speculations

Abstract

There are a number of ways to gain insights into how different parts of the brain extract speech from seen faces. Experimental data from normal subjects, from neuropsychological patients, from developmental disorders affecting cognition and from direct imaging of brain processes — all illuminate some parts of the story (if sometimes in a contradictory way). This chapter reviews findings concerned with the localization of face and (written and auditory) speech processing in order to gain some ideas about the possible neural systems that are required to obtain speech from seen faces, and to suggest the extent to which these may rest on broader functional bases.