This is just my educated guess from reading the article, but it sounds like there's some fast but simple circuitry that just listens for sounds from the ear and fills a buffer, timestamping each sound as it goes. Then periodically the buffer gets dumped into a larger portion of the brain that recognizes meaning. If the brain had each sound dumped individually in order it would be much less efficient. So this is just an optimization so it can understand more speech faster by batching the sounds? If so, this is kinda like how a computer network batches data into packets instead of sending 1's and 0's one at a time.