Scientists from Duke University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) claim that have discovered an area in human brain that processes the timing of speech, a crucial element of spoken language.

Researchers said that timing plays a vital role in structuring of human speech. To understand speech brain needs to integrate the rapidly evolving information.

Study co-author Tobias Overath, an assistant research professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke said that the auditory system like the sensory systems takes shortcuts to cope with the onslaught of information.

It samples information in small chunks similar in length to that of an average consonant or syllable, he said.

In the study published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, Overath and his team cut recordings of foreign speech into short chunks ranging from 30 to 960 milliseconds in length.

They then reassembled the pieces using a novel algorithm to create new seconds that the authors call 'speech quilts'.

Researchers noted that the shorter the pieces of the resulting speech quilt, the greater was the disruption caused to the original structure of the speech.

Furthermore, to measure the activity of neurons in real time, the team played speech quilts to study participants while scanning their brains in a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine.

The team theorized that the brain areas involved in speech processing would show larger responses to speech quilts made up of longer segments.

The researchers found that a region of the brain called the superior temporal sulcus (STS) became highly active during the 480- and 960-millisecond quilts compared with the 30-millisecond quilts.

Overath said this was quite exciting moment for is entire team. He said they knew hey were onto something.

The superior temporal sulcus is known to integrate auditory and other sensory information. But so far no one has ever shown that the STS is sensitive to time structures in speech, said team.