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Peer-reviewedCC BY-NC-ND 4.0Nature Communications

Independent basal ganglia neural populations encode speech production and ambient-noise levels

  • Latané Bullock1,2,3
  • Matteo Vissani1,2
  • Alan Bush1,2
  • Jackie S. Kim4
  • Lori L. Holt5
  • Julie Fiez6,7
  • Robert S. Turner7,8
  • Todd M. Herrington1
  • Jeffrey S. Schweitzer1,2
  • Frank H. Guenther4,9,10
  • R. Mark Richardson1,2
10 affiliations
  1. 1Department of Neurology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA USA
  2. 2Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA USA
  3. 3Program in Speech and Hearing Bioscience and Technology, Division of Medical Sciences, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA USA
  4. 4Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences, Boston University, Boston, MA USA
  5. 5Department of Psychology, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX USA
  6. 6Department of Psychology, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA USA
  7. 7Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition, University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania USA
  8. 8Department of Neurobiology, Center for Neuroscience, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, USA
  9. 9Department of Biomedical Engineering, Boston University, Boston, MA USA
  10. 10Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA USA
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Abstract

The basal ganglia’s (BG) contribution to motor control is thought to involve invigorating movement based on environmental constraints, yet this has primarily been studied in the limb system. We hypothesized that the BG similarly regulate the respiratory and articulatory systems during speech. We recorded local field potentials and single-unit activity from the subthalamic nucleus (STN) and globus pallidus (GP) in humans during a speech task where the Lombard Effect was used to modulate environmental constraints. GP and STN exhibited distinct temporal profiles during speech production. Neither region robustly encoded produced speech intensity. Instead, neural populations tracked ambient background noise levels, even during baseline, with high decoding accuracy. The ambient-noise-modulated sites were an independent population from speech-modulated sites. We theorize that the code is leveraged in downstream BG-cortical loop nodes to invigorate speech oro-motor gestures and co-speech manual limb gestures, both of which respond to ambient noise levels to maintain high-fidelity communication.

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Cite

BibTeXRIS
BibTeX
@article{bullock2026independent,
  title = {{Independent basal ganglia neural populations encode speech production and ambient-noise levels}},
  author = {Latané Bullock and Matteo Vissani and Alan Bush and Jackie S. Kim and Lori L. Holt and Julie Fiez and Robert S. Turner and Todd M. Herrington and Jeffrey S. Schweitzer and Frank H. Guenther and R. Mark Richardson},
  journal = {Nature Communications},
  year = {2026},
  month = sep,
  doi = {10.1038/s41467-026-77937-8},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-77937-8},
  note = {CC BY-NC-ND 4.0},
}
RIS
TY  - JOUR
TI  - Independent basal ganglia neural populations encode speech production and ambient-noise levels
AU  - Latané Bullock
AU  - Matteo Vissani
AU  - Alan Bush
AU  - Jackie S. Kim
AU  - Lori L. Holt
AU  - Julie Fiez
AU  - Robert S. Turner
AU  - Todd M. Herrington
AU  - Jeffrey S. Schweitzer
AU  - Frank H. Guenther
AU  - R. Mark Richardson
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/09/25
JO  - Nature Communications
DO  - 10.1038/s41467-026-77937-8
UR  - https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-77937-8
AB  - The basal ganglia’s (BG) contribution to motor control is thought to involve invigorating movement based on environmental constraints, yet this has primarily been studied in the limb system. We hypothesized that the BG similarly regulate the respiratory and articulatory systems during speech. We recorded local field potentials and single-unit activity from the subthalamic nucleus (STN) and globus pallidus (GP) in humans during a speech task where the Lombard Effect was used to modulate environmental constraints. GP and STN exhibited distinct temporal profiles during speech production. Neither region robustly encoded produced speech intensity. Instead, neural populations tracked ambient background noise levels, even during baseline, with high decoding accuracy. The ambient-noise-modulated sites were an independent population from speech-modulated sites. We theorize that the code is leveraged in downstream BG-cortical loop nodes to invigorate speech oro-motor gestures and co-speech manual limb gestures, both of which respond to ambient noise levels to maintain high-fidelity communication.
SN  - 2041-1723
ER  -