AI Article Synopsis
- The study explored how categorical perception (CP) of speech impacts the understanding of speech in noisy environments.
- Behavioral changes were mainly noted at low signal-to-noise ratios (SNR), indicating that listeners struggled more with categorization when noise was prevalent.
- Neural responses showed that recognizable speech categories are better preserved in noise, suggesting that organizing sounds into clear categories helps listeners perceive speech more effectively amid distractions.
Article Abstract
We investigated whether the categorical perception (CP) of speech might also provide a mechanism that aids its perception in noise. We varied signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) [clear, 0 dB, -5 dB] while listeners classified an acoustic-phonetic continuum (/u/ to /a/). Noise-related changes in behavioral categorization were only observed at the lowest SNR. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) differentiated category vs. category-ambiguous speech by the P2 wave (~180-320 ms). Paralleling behavior, neural responses to speech with clear phonetic status (i.e., continuum endpoints) were robust to noise down to -5 dB SNR, whereas responses to ambiguous tokens declined with decreasing SNR. Results demonstrate that phonetic speech representations are more resistant to degradation than corresponding acoustic representations. Findings suggest the mere process of binning speech sounds into categories provides a robust mechanism to aid figure-ground speech perception by fortifying abstract categories from the acoustic signal and making the speech code more resistant to external interferences.
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| http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7057933 | PMC |
| http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fnins.2020.00153 | DOI Listing |
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