Acoustic information about the place of articulation of a prevocalic nasal consonant is distributed over two distinct signal portions, the nasal murmur and the onset of the following vowel. The spectral properties of these signal portions are perceptually important, as is their relationship (the pattern of spectral change). A series of experiments was conducted to investigate to what extent rel...

Title of Document: ON THE WAY TO LINGUISTIC REPRESENTATION: NEUROMAGNETIC EVIDENCE OF EARLY AUDITORY ABSTRACTION IN THE PERCEPTION OF SPEECH AND PITCH Philip J. Monahan, Ph.D., 2009 Directed By: Assoc. Prof. William J. Idsardi, Linguistics Prof. David Poeppel, Linguistics & Biology The goal of this dissertation is to show that even at the earliest (non-invasive) recordable stages of auditory co...

A visual speech training aid for persons with hearing impairments has been developed using a Windows-based multimedia computer. The training aid provides real time visual feedback as to the quality of pronunciation for 10 steady-state American English monopthong vowels (/aa/, /iy/, /uw/, /ae/, /er/, /ih/, /eh/, /ao/, /ah/, and /uh/). This training aid is thus referred to as a Vowel Articulation...

We investigate whether the neural correlates of the continuity illusion, as measured using fMRI, are modulated by attention. As we have shown previously, when two formants of a synthetic vowel are presented in an alternating pattern, the vowel can be identified if the gaps in each formant are filled with bursts of plausible masking noise, causing the illusory percept of a continuous vowel ("Ill...

This study demonstrates by means of magnetic source imaging how consonants and vowels that constitute a syllable differently affect the neural processing within the auditory cortex. We recently identified a topographically separate processing for mutually exclusive place features in isolated vowels (Obleser et al., in press). Does this mapping principle also hold for stop consonants with differ...

This study further elucidates determinants of vowel perception in the human auditory cortex. The vowel inventory of a given language can be classified on the basis of phonological features which are closely linked to acoustic properties. A cortical representation of speech sounds based on these phonological features might explain the surprisingly inverse correlation between immense variance in ...

This paper introduces a method to esitimate the spectrum of voiced speech in noise, based on an estimate of the fundamental frequency. The method uses the output of an auditory model that imitates the mechanics of the basilar membrane. The output of the segments of the model is used as an input to a set of leaky autocorrelator units (as simple neuron models) sensitive to a certain periodicity (...

Imagined speech plays a central role in human consciousness, and its understanding is of great importance for the construction of a speech-like Brain-Computer Interface (BCI). Such BCIs would considerably benefit patients suffering from severe conditions where they are unable to verbally communicate, despite being fully conscious. The goal of this study was to build a non-invasive closed-loop B...

The paper addresses the question of native speakers’ online awareness and perceptual use of phonetic nasalisation by examining surface nasalisation in two types of surface vowels in Bengali: underlying nasal vowels and nasalised vowels before a nasal consonant. In a cross-modal forced-choice experiment, we investigate the hypothesis that only unpredictable nasalisation is represented and that t...

Previous research employing a real-time auditory perturbation paradigm has shown that talkers monitor their own speech attributes such as fundamental frequency, vowel intensity, vowel formants, and fricative noise as part of speech motor control. In the case of vowel formants or fricative noise, what was manipulated is spectral information about the filter function of the vocal tract. However, ...