New paper! (Orpella et al., PNAS, 2026)

New paper led by Joan:

Joan Orpella, Francesco Mantegna, Chantal Oderbolz, David Poeppel (2024). "Temporally structured motor and auditory representations in covert syllable production." PNAS.

Available here.

Speaking silently in one’s mind is a pervasive feature of human cognition, yet its neural basis remains unclear. Using magnetoencephalography, we show that covert syllable production unfolds through a coordinated sequence of motor and auditory activity resembling overt speech. Motor regions encode articulatory features before imagined utterances, while auditory regions represent their predicted sound. These findings provide evidence for temporally structured sensorimotor representations during covert speech production and support accounts in which the mind generates its own voice through coordinated motor and auditory processes.