Definition
Speech sounds are composed of both rapid spectrotemporal changes and slow steady-state portions. The neural coding of speech sounds involves the representation of precise action potential timing across many cortical areas. Behavioral speech sound discrimination accuracy is well predicted by quantifying the similarity between the spatiotemporal response patterns evoked by two sounds.
Detailed Description
Speech Sounds
Speech sounds, like all sounds, evoke patterns of activity in the auditory nerve that are transmitted to the central nervous system. The brain must accurately identify speech sounds despite large amounts of acoustic variability. For example, it is possible to perceive the word “dad” regardless of who is speaking (a male, female, or child), in various types of degradation (at a cocktail party or a concert), or at...
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Carlson NL, Ming VL, DeWeese MR (2012) Sparse codes for speech predict spectrotemporal receptive fields in the inferior colliculus. PLoS Comput Biol 8:e1002594
Engineer CT, Perez CA, Chen YTH, Carraway RS, Reed AC, Shetake JA, Jakkamsetti V, Chang KQ, Kilgard MP (2008) Cortical activity patterns predict speech discrimination ability. Nat Neurosci 11:603–608
Kluender KR, Diehl RL, Killeen PR (1987) Japanese quail can learn phonetic categories. Science 237:1195–1197
Kuhl PK, Miller JD (1975) Speech perception by the chinchilla: voiced-voiceless distinction in alveolar plosive consonants. Science 190:69–72
Lee JH, Russ BE, Orr LE, Cohen YE (2009) Prefrontal activity predicts monkeys’ decisions during an auditory category task. Front Integr Neurosci 3:16
Mesgarani N, David SV, Fritz JB, Shamma SA (2008) Phoneme representation and classification in primary auditory cortex. J Acoust Soc Am 123:899
Miller CT, Cohen YE (2010) Vocalizations as auditory objects: behavior and neurophysiology. In: Platt M, Ghazanfar A (eds) Primate neuroethology. Oxford University Press, New York, pp 237–255
Pasley BN, David SV, Mesgarani N, Flinker A, Shamma SA, Crone NE, Knight RT, Chang EF (2012) Reconstructing speech from human auditory cortex. PLoS Biol 10:e1001251
Perez CA, Engineer CT, Jakkamsetti V, Carraway RS, Perry MS, Kilgard MP (2013) Different timescales for the neural coding of consonant and vowel sounds. Cereb Cortex 23(3):670–683
Poeppel D (2003) The analysis of speech in different temporal integration windows: cerebral lateralization as ‘asymmetric sampling in time’. Speech Commun 41:245–255
Ranasinghe KG, Vrana WA, Matney CJ, Kilgard MP (2012) Neural mechanisms supporting robust discrimination of spectrally and temporally degraded speech. J Assoc Res Otolaryngol 13:527–542
Rauschecker JP, Scott SK (2009) Maps and streams in the auditory cortex: nonhuman primates illuminate human speech processing. Nat Neurosci 12:718–724
Reed P, Howell P, Sackin S, Pizzimenti L, Rosen S (2003) Speech perception in rats: use of duration and rise time cues in labeling of affricate/fricative sounds. J Exp Anal Behav 80:205–215
Russ BE, Ackelson AL, Baker AE, Cohen YE (2008) Coding of auditory-stimulus identity in the auditory non-spatial processing stream. J Neurophysiol 99:87–95
Schnupp JW, Hall TM, Kokelaar RF, Ahmed B (2006) Plasticity of temporal pattern codes for vocalization stimuli in primary auditory cortex. J Neurosci 26:4785–4795
Schnupp J, Nelken I, King A (2010) Auditory neuroscience: making sense of sound. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA
Schreiner CE, Wong SW, Dinse HR (2006) Temporal processing in cat primary auditory cortex: dynamic frequency tuning and spectro-temporal representation of speech sounds. In: Greenberg S, Ainsworth WA (eds) Listening to speech: an auditory perspective. Lawrence Erlbaum, Mahwah, pp 129–141
Sharma A, Marsh CM, Dorman MF (2000) Relationship between N1 evoked potential morphology and the perception of voicing. J Acoust Soc Am 108:3030
Shetake JA, Wolf JT, Cheung RJ, Engineer CT, Ram SK, Kilgard MP (2011) Cortical activity patterns predict robust speech discrimination ability in noise. Eur J Neurosci 34:1823–1838
Steinschneider M, Reser D, Schroeder CE, Arezzo JC (1995) Tonotopic organization of responses reflecting stop consonant place of articulation in primary auditory cortex (A1) of the monkey. Brain Res 674:147–152
Steinschneider M, Volkov IO, Noh MD, Garell PC, Howard MA 3rd (1999) Temporal encoding of the voice onset time phonetic parameter by field potentials recorded directly from human auditory cortex. J Neurophysiol 82:2346–2357
Steinschneider M, Fishman YI, Arezzo JC (2003) Representation of the voice onset time (VOT) speech parameter in population responses within primary auditory cortex of the awake monkey. J Acoust Soc Am 114:307–321
Steinschneider M, Volkov IO, Fishman YI, Oya H, Arezzo JC, Howard MA (2005) Intracortical responses in human and monkey primary auditory cortex support a temporal processing mechanism for encoding of the voice onset time phonetic parameter. Cereb Cortex 15:170–186
Wong SW, Schreiner CE (2003) Representation of CV-sounds in cat primary auditory cortex: intensity dependence. Speech Commun 41:93–106
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2015 Springer Science+Business Media New York
About this entry
Cite this entry
Kilgard, M.P., Engineer, C.T. (2015). Neural Coding of Speech Sounds. In: Jaeger, D., Jung, R. (eds) Encyclopedia of Computational Neuroscience. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6675-8_433
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6675-8_433
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY
Print ISBN: 978-1-4614-6674-1
Online ISBN: 978-1-4614-6675-8
eBook Packages: Biomedical and Life SciencesReference Module Biomedical and Life Sciences