03.03.2025New paper by Oderbolz, Pöppel and Meyer on functional lateralization and structural asymmetry of speech-related cortical regions

Twenty-five years ago, David Poeppel published his “Asymmetric Sampling in Time” hypothesis, which described a possible division of labor between the auditory regions in the left and right hemispheres of the human brain during the initial phase of speech processing. For the first time, researchers' attention was focused on the role of the right hemisphere in processing spoken language. Now we have asked ourselves what the situation is regarding the hypothesis after twenty-five years. Has it proven itself as a model? Is this division of labor unique to language or can comparable mechanisms be found in the animal kingdom? Is there a neuroanatomical asymmetry corresponding to functional lateralization that supports or even makes possible the different modes of acoustic processing? In this publication, we provide answers to these and many other questions.

DOI