Representations of fricatives in subcortical model responses: Comparisons with human consonant perception.

Fricatives are obstruent sound contrasts made by airflow constrictions in the vocal tract that produce turbulence across the constriction or at a site downstream from the constriction. Fricatives exhibit significant intra/intersubject and contextual variability. Yet, fricatives are perceived with high accuracy.

Nonlinear auditory models yield new insights into representations of vowels.

Studies of vowel systems regularly appeal to the need to understand how the auditory system encodes and processes the information in the acoustic signal. The goal of this study is to present computational models to address this need, and to use the models to illustrate responses to vowels at two levels of the auditory pathway. Many of the models previously used to study auditory representations of speech are based on linear filter banks simulating the tuning of the inner ear.

Speech Coding in the Brain: Representation of Vowel Formants by Midbrain Neurons Tuned to Sound Fluctuations.

Current models for neural coding of vowels are typically based on linear descriptions of the auditory periphery, and fail at high sound levels and in background noise. These models rely on either auditory nerve discharge rates or phase locking to temporal fine structure. However, both discharge rates and phase locking saturate at moderate to high sound levels, and phase locking is degraded in the CNS at middle to high frequencies.

Anticipatory Deaccenting in Language Comprehension.

We evaluated the hypothesis that listeners can generate expectations about upcoming input using anticipatory deaccenting, in which the absence of a nuclear pitch accent on an utterance-new noun is licensed by the subsequent repetition of that noun (e.g. ).