SEARCHING FOR PHONOLOGICAL PROCESSING IN THE AUDITORY SYSTEM: II
Damped, Foreign, Inverted, Whispered, and Sinusoidal Vowels, plus Musical Rain

Motivation

In an effort to determine where the perception of speech occurs in the brain, we have developed six sets of stimuli that sound more or less like speech. Listeners have rated how speech like the stimuli are and we will search for an area in the brain where the distribution of activation across conditions resembles the perceptual ratings.

 


Stimuli

This figure illustrates a variety of spectrally matched vowel sounds, ranging from natural to unrecognisable : -

a - Damped vowels (natural)

b - foreign vowels

c - inverted vowels

d - whispered vowels

e - sinusoidal vowels

f - Musical rain (unrecognisable)

 


Results

Coming soon.

 


References

Uppenkamp S, Kothari A, Bailes, J, Patterson RD (2001) When is a vowel not a vowel? Brit J Audiology 35, 159 (A)
Griffiths TD, Uppenkamp S, Johnsrude I, Josephs O, Patterson RD (2001) Encoding of the temporal regularity of sound in the human brainstem. Nature Neuroscience 4, 633-637
Patterson RD (1994) The sound of a sinusoid: time-interval models. J Acoust Soc Am 96, 1419-1428
Hall DA, Haggard MP, Akeroyd MA, Palmer AR, Summerfield AQ, Elliott MR, Gurney EM, Bowtell RW (1999) “Sparse” temporal sampling in auditory fMRI. Hum. Brain Mapping 7, 213-223.