Human speech consists of a variety of articulated sounds that vary dynamically in spectral composition. We investigated the neural activity associated with the perception of two types of speech segments: (a) the period of rapid spectral transition occurring at the beginning of a stop-consonant vowel (CV) syllable and (b) the subsequent spectral steady-state period occurring during the vowel seg...

It is well established that in human speech perception the left hemisphere (LH) of the brain is specialized for processing intelligible phonemic (segmental) content (e.g., [1-3]), whereas the right hemisphere (RH) is more sensitive to prosodic (suprasegmental) cues. Despite evidence that a range of mammal species show LH specialization when processing conspecific vocalizations, the presence of ...

This paper reports on the results of a study investigating the effect of L2 lexical knowledge on the perception of nonnative phonemic contrasts. An AX auditory discrimination task was used to test the ability of a group of bilingual Spanish/Catalan advanced learners of English (N=74) to perceive 9 English phonemic contrasts. The aural stimuli consisted of 144 word pairs (108 minimal pairs and 3...

The theory of relational acoustic invariance [Pickett, E. R., et al. (1999). Phonetica 56, 135-157] was tested with the Japanese stop quantity distinction in disyllables spoken at various rates. The questions were whether the perceptual boundary between the two phonemic categories of single and geminate stops is invariant across rates, and whether there is a close correspondence between the per...

OBJECTIVES Speech intelligibility is strongly influenced by the ability to process temporal modulations. It is hypothesized that in dyslexia, deficient processing of rapidly changing auditory information underlies a deficient development of phonological representations, causing reading and spelling problems. Low-frequency modulations between 4 and 20 Hz correspond to the processing rate of impo...

This research topic describes recent advances in understanding the brain functional organization for sensory categorization along with its implications for speech perception. Among the 14 papers, one theme is how neural representations of auditory and visual input are transformed across different scales of neural organization to enable speech perception, and another is the neural mechanisms of ...

This study focuses on the early cerebral base of speech perception by examining functional lateralization in neonates for processing segmental and suprasegmental features of speech. For this purpose, auditory evoked responses of full-term neonates to phonemic and prosodic contrasts were measured in their temporal area and part of the frontal and parietal areas using near-infrared spectroscopy (...

Categorical perception is a pervasive phenomenon in phonemic identification and has been demonstrated in the last decades through behavioral experiments and, more recently, in neurophysiological studies. However, the precise neural mechanisms underlying the transformation of continuous physical properties into discrete phonemic units is still largely unknown. This paper presents a study that ai...