A possible neural basis for the categorical perception of the English voiced/voiceless contrast
نویسندگان
چکیده
"\Ye describe the representation of synthetic stopconsonants in a computational model of the mammalian dorsal cochlear nucleus. The speech stimuli have different values of voice-onset time (VOT) and are Iabelied by adult listeners as either /ga/ or /ka/, with a phonetic boundary at 44 ms VOT. The responses of the model's Type IV units to these stimuli also fall into two clear categories with a boundary at 45 ms VOT. These results provide evidence that the categorical perception of voicing in initial English stopsobserved in behavioural experiments using human subjects (infant and adult) and chinchillasmay arise as a consequence of the representation of these sounds in the mammalian auditory nervous system at the Ievel of the dorsal acoustic stria.
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