Person: Munoz Miranda, William
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Munoz Miranda
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William
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Munoz Miranda, William
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Publication Single-neuronal elements of speech production in humans(Springer Science and Business Media LLC, 2024-01-31) Khanna, Arjun R.; Munoz Miranda, William; Kim, Young J.; Kfir, Yoav; Paulk, Angelique C.; Jamali, Mohsen; Cai, Jing; Mustroph, Martina; Caprara, Irene; Hardstone, Richard; Meszena, Domokos; Zuckerman, Abigail; Schweitzer, Jeffrey; Cash, Sydney; Williams, Ziv M.Humans are capable of generating extraordinarily diverse articulatory movement combinations in order to produce meaningful speech. This ability to orchestrate specific phonetic sequences, their syllabification and inflection over sub-second timescales allows us to produce thousands of word-sounds and is a core component of language 1,2. The basic cellular units and constructs by which we plan and produce words during speech, however, remain largely unknown. Here, using acute ultrahigh density Neuropixels recordings in humans, we discover neurons in the language-dominant prefrontal cortex that encoded detailed information about the phonetic arrangement and composition of planned words during the production of natural speech. These neurons represented the specific order and structure of articulatory events prior to utterance and reflected the segmentation of phonetic sequences into distinct syllables. They also reliably predicted the phonetic, syllabic and morphological components of upcoming words and displayed a temporally ordered dynamic. Taken collectively, we show how these cells were spatially organized and how their activity patterns transitioned from articulation planning to production in real-time. We also demonstrate how they tracked the composition of phonemes during perception, and how they distinguished processes specifically related to speaking from listening. Together, these findings reveal a remarkably structured organization and encoding cascade of phonetic representations by prefrontal neurons in humans and a cellular process that can support the production of natural speech.Publication Semantic encoding during language comprehension at single-cell resolution(Springer Science and Business Media LLC, 2024-07-03) Jamali, Mohsen; Grannan, Benjamin; Cai, Jing; Khanna, Arjun; Munoz Miranda, William; Caprara, Irene; Paulk, Angelique; Cash, Sydney; Fedorenko, Evelina; Williams, ZivFrom sequences of speech sounds, or letters, humans can extract rich and nuanced meaning through language. This capacity is essential for human communication. Yet, despite a growing understanding of the brain areas that support linguistic and semantic processing, the derivation of linguistic meaning in neural tissue at the cellular level and over the timescale of action potentials remains largely unknown. Here, we recorded from single cells in the left language-dominant prefrontal cortex as participants listened to semantically diverse sentences and naturalistic stories. By tracking their activities during natural speech processing, we discover a remarkably fine scale representation of semantic information by individual neurons. These neurons responded selectively to specific word meanings and reliably distinguished words from nonwords. Their activities were also dynamic, reflecting the words’ meanings based on their specific sentence contexts and independent of their phonetic form. Modeled collectively, we show how these cell ensembles accurately predicted the broad semantic categories of the words as they were heard in real-time during speech. We also show how they encoded the hierarchical structure of these meaning representations and how they mapped onto the population’s response patterns. Together, these findings reveal a detailed organization of semantic representations by prefrontal neurons in humans and begin to illuminate the cellular-level processing of meaning during language comprehension.