Phoneme processing

A phoneme is traditionally viewed as a sound in a given spoken language, which native speakers of that language perceive as just one segment and which enables them to discriminate between words with different meanings. Each phoneme encompasses a group of similarly sounding phones. Consequentially, speakers of different languages encode in their brain different sets of phonemes. These phonemes emerge in the speaker's brain toward the end of the 1st year of life. It is currently debated as to what degree these phonemic representations are composed of auditory, articulatory, or abstract information. It is currently also unclear to what extent the brain uses phoneme and/or syllable representations during speech recognition. In contrast, it is relatively accepted that phonemes are used during speech production. In the brain, sensitivity to phonemes is highly distributed throughout speech sensitive cortices, though this may reflect multiple levels of processing unrelated to encoding of phonemes per se. Some scientists maintain that phonemes are encoded in the sound recognition pathway (auditory ventral stream), whereas others (ourselves included) suggest that phonemes are encoded in the speech production pathway (auditory dorsal stream).