Katrina Barth

Abstract The neural basis of speech production involves the rapid transition from abstract planning of speech units such as syllables and phonemes, to the motor execution of speech sounds. Although a distributed network of brain regions has been implicated in speech production overall, it is unclear how the brain transitions from planning to execution for speech production.

Abstract Patients suffering from debilitating neurodegenerative diseases often lose the ability to communicate, detrimentally affecting their quality of life. One solution to restore communication is to decode signals directly from the brain to enable neural speech prostheses. However, decoding has been limited by coarse neural recordings which inadequately capture the rich spatio-temporal structure of human brain signals.