Thinking the voice: Neural correlates of voice perception

The human voice is the carrier of speech, but also an ’auditory face ’ that conveys important affective and identity information. Little is known about the neural bases of our abilities to perceive such paralinguistic information in voice. Results from recent neuroimaging studies suggest that the different types of vocal infor-mation could be processed in partially dissociated func-tional pathways, and support a neurocognitive model of voice perception largely similar to that proposed for face perception. The human voice is the most important sound of our auditory environment. We probably spend more time everyday listening to voices than to any other sound, and our ability to analyze and categorize information contained in voices plays a key role in human socia