The neuroanatomic and neurophysiological infrastructure for speech and language

•The anatomic organization for language is less lateralized than assumed.•Speech and language processing are mediated by segregated concurrent processing streams.•The anatomic and functional complexity of local regions needs to be acknowledged.•Neural oscillations provide a possible mechanism to parse speech.

New tools and new ideas have changed how we think about the neurobiological foundations of speech and language processing. This perspective focuses on two areas of progress. First, focusing on spatial organization in the human brain, the revised functional anatomy for speech and language is discussed. The complexity of the network organization undermines the well-regarded classical model and suggests looking for more granular computational primitives, motivated both by linguistic theory and neural circuitry. Second, focusing on recent work on temporal organization, a potential role of cortical oscillations for speech processing is outlined. Such an implementational-level mechanism suggests one way to deal with the computational challenge of segmenting natural speech.