Dynamic encoding of phonetic categories in zebra finch auditory forebrain.

ABSTRACT: Vocal communication requires the formation of acoustic categories to enable invariant representations of sounds despite superficial variations. Humans form acoustic categories for speech phonemes, enabling the listener to recognize words independent of speakers; animals can also discriminate speech phonemes. We investigated the neural mechanisms of this process using electrophysiological recordings from the zebra finch secondary auditory area, caudomedial nidopallium (NCM), during passive exposure to human speech stimuli consisting of two naturally spoken words produced by multiple speakers. Analysis of neural distance and decoding accuracy showed improvements in neural discrimination between word categories over the course of exposure, and this improved representation transferred to the s

SUBMITTER: Liu W 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10333302 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature