Scientists from Duke and MIT have found the area of the brain where speech is formed in a groundbreaking new discovery.

This particular portion of the brain is sensitive to speech timing, which is critical to verbal language as the brain must quickly integrate rapidly changing information, according to a Duke Today report.

The auditory system uses shortcuts to handle huge quantities of information, often through creative techniques like sampling small bits of information.

The study, which appeared recently in the journal Nature Neuroscience, involving cutting recordings of foreign speech into small samples that range from as low as 30 milliseconds in length to as high as 960 milliseconds, and then used an algorithm to reassemble those bits to create new speech.

Calling them “speech quilts,” the researchers found that the shorter these bits were in the quilts, the more disruptive they are to the speech’s structure.

The scientists scanned the brains of people who participated in the study as they played speech quilts to them, believe that they would find that the brain area that processes speech would show itself, especially in speech quilts of longer bits. They found that they were right, locating a portion of the brain called the superior temporal sulcus that lit up during the longer 480-millisecond and 960-millisecond quilts, a significant different from the 30-millisecond quilts.

The team of scientists also used control sounds to make sure the STS is indeed sensitive to time structure in speech, and were successful in doing so.