Rad, Lad. You might be able to hear the difference, but to many children and adults, these words sound exactly the same. The problem isn’t that they can’t hear the sounds. The problem is that they can’t tell them apart.
One in 20 children in kindergarten has difficulties understanding speech that are not related to hearing or problems with their ears. The reason is that speech discrimination is a problem solved in the brain, not in the ear. How does the brain process speech sounds? Very little was known, until now.
“Now that we’ve cracked the door on this important problem, we should be able to understand the neural basis of many common speech processing disorders and use this information to develop new treatments,” said Dr. Kilgard.
The recordings showed that contrary to prior belief it’s not the quantity of neurons that fire in response to a speech sound that is important. It is which neurons are firing and exactly when they are firing – down to the millisecond – that is critical.
clipped from: physorg.com 