Detection and modulation rate discrimination were measured in cochlear-implant users for pulse-trains that were either sinusoidally amplitude modulated or were modulated with half-wave rectified sinusoids, which in acoustic hearing have been used to simulate the response to low-frequency temporal fine structure. In contrast to comparable results from acoustic hearing, modulation rate discrimina...

Following publication of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, evidence has accumulated for the influence of language experience on perception. There are thousands of languages in the world which make use of pitch patterns to construct words much as vowels and consonants are used, among which Mandarin (a.k.a. Putonghua) is a typical tone language. This study examines the effect of language experience (to...

Two related studies investigated the relationship between place-pitch sensitivity and consonant recognition in cochlear implant listeners using the Nucleus MPEAK and SPEAK speech processing strategies. Average place-pitch sensitivity across the electrode array was evaluated as a function of electrode separation, using a psychophysical electrode pitch-ranking task. Consonant recognition was asse...

Harmonic complex tones produce pitch-height perception corresponding to the fundamental frequency (F0). This study investigates how the spectral cue of F0 is processed in neurons of the primary auditory cortex (A1) with sustained-response properties. We found F0-sensitive and -insensitive cells: the former discriminated between harmonics and noise, while the latter did not. F0-sensitive cells p...

In this work, we show that electrophysiological responses during pitch perception are best explained by distributed activity in a hierarchy of cortical sources and, crucially, that the effective connectivity between these sources is modulated with pitch strength. Local field potentials were recorded in two subjects from primary auditory cortex and adjacent auditory cortical areas along the axis...

The strong association between music and speech has been supported by recent research focusing on musicians' superior abilities in second language learning and neural encoding of foreign speech sounds. However, evidence for a double association--the influence of linguistic background on music pitch processing and disorders--remains elusive. Because languages differ in their usage of elements (e...

Although music is universal, there is a great deal of cultural variability in music structures. Nevertheless, some aspects of music processing generalize across cultures, whereas others rely heavily on the listening environment. Here, we discuss the development of musical knowledge, focusing on four themes: (a) capabilities that are present early in development; (b) culture-general and culture-...

OBJECTIVE The purpose of the present study was to test the hypothesis that cochlear implant (CI) users' music perception is correlated with their lexical tone perception, and the two types of perception share similar mechanisms in electric hearing. DESIGN A lexical tone perception test and a pitch interval discrimination test were administered to a group of CI users and a group of normal-hear...

Although pitch is a fundamental attribute of auditory perception, substantial individual differences exist in our ability to perceive differences in pitch. Little is known about how these individual differences in the auditory modality might affect crossmodal processes such as audiovisual perception. In this study, we asked whether individual differences in pitch perception might affect audiovi...

Pitch perception is important for understanding speech prosody, music perception, recognizing tones in tonal languages, and perceiving speech in noisy environments. The two principal pitch perception theories consider the place of maximum neural excitation along the auditory nerve and the temporal pattern of the auditory neurons' action potentials (spikes) as pitch cues. This paper describes a ...