By using advanced brain recording techniques, a new study led by researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) demonstrates how neurons in the human brain work together to allow people to think about what words they want to say and then produce them aloud through speech.

Together, these findings provide a detailed map of how speech sounds such as consonants and vowels are represented in the brain well before they are even spoken and how they are strung together during language production.

The work, which is published in Nature, reveals insights into the brain's neurons that enable language production, and which could lead to improvements in the understanding and treatment of speech and language disorders.

"Although speaking usually seems easy, our brains perform many complex cognitive steps in the production of natural speech—including coming up with the words we want to say, planning the articulatory movements and producing our intended vocalizations," says senior author Ziv Williams, MD, an associate professor in Neurosurgery at MGH and Harvard Medical School.

"Our brains perform these feats surprisingly fast—about three words per second in natural speech—with remarkably few errors. Yet how we precisely achieve this feat has remained a mystery."

When they used a cutting-edge technology called Neuropixels probes to record the activities of single neurons in the prefrontal cortex, a frontal region of the human brain, Williams and his colleagues identified cells that are involved in language production and that may underlie the ability to speak. They also found that there are separate groups of neurons in the brain dedicated to speaking and listening.

"The use of Neuropixels probes in humans was first pioneered at MGH. These probes are remarkable—they are smaller than the width of a human hair, yet they also have hundreds of channels that are capable of simultaneously recording the activity of dozens or even hundreds of individual neurons," says Williams, who had worked to develop these recording techniques with Sydney Cash, MD, Ph.D., a professor in Neurology at MGH and Harvard Medical School, who also helped lead the study.

"Use of these probes can therefore offer unprecedented new insights into how neurons in humans collectively act and how they work together to produce complex human behaviors such as language," Williams continues.

The study showed how neurons in the brain represent some of the most basic elements involved in constructing spoken words—from simple speech sounds called phonemes to their assembly into more complex strings such as syllables.

For example, the consonant "da," which is produced by touching the tongue to the hard palate behind the teeth, is needed to produce the word dog.

By recording individual neurons, the researchers found that certain neurons become active before this phoneme is spoken out loud. Other neurons reflected more complex aspects of word construction such as the specific assembly of phonemes into syllables.

With their technology, the investigators showed that it's possible to reliably determine the speech sounds that individuals will say before they articulate them.