Figure 6.

Dual-stream model for speech perception. (A) An example of Chinese sentence comprised of various linguistic elements (phoneme, lexical tone, word-level, and sentence-level prosody). The spectrogram and pitch contours of each lexical tone and prosody were extracted from the sentence spoken by a male Mandarin native speaker. Notably, lexical tone can bridge single vowel, double vowels (e.g., /ai/), triple vowels, or vowel and nasal consonant (e.g., /an/), although it is labeled upon single vowel in Pinyin. (B) Dual-stream model for speech perception in which the ventral stream is involved in spectrotemporal analysis and the dorsal stream is responsible for sensorimotor integration. Ventral stream: gradient representations of different linguistic elements in bilateral superior temporal gyrus (STG). Dorsal stream: topological representations of phoneme, tonal tone and sentence prosody in the left precentral gyrus (preCG), corresponding to different places of articulation.