The human language processing system straightens natural speech

Large language models trained on next-word prediction have impressive linguistic capabilities. This suggests that the goal of temporal prediction is essential to language processing, but how this goal impacts the structure of speech representations in the human brain remains unknown. Here, we test the hypothesis that prediction is facilitated by the temporal straightening of representational trajectories along the speech processing hierarchy. We developed a methodology for measuring the curvature of these trajectories using fMRI. Our method exploits a previously unknown connection between the timescale of single-unit responses and the curvature of population trajectories. We examined brain r