Hemispheric asymmetries in speech perception: sense, nonsense and modulations.

ABSTRACT:

Background

The well-established left hemisphere specialisation for language processing has long been claimed to be based on a low-level auditory specialization for specific acoustic features in speech, particularly regarding 'rapid temporal processing'.

Methodology

A novel analysis/synthesis technique was used to construct a variety of sounds based on simple sentences which could be manipulated in spectro-temporal complexity, and whether they were intelligible or not. All sounds consisted of two noise-excited spectral prominences (based on the lower two formants in the original speech) which could be static or varying in frequency and/or amplitude independently. Dynamically varying both acoustic features based on the same sentence led to intelligible speech but when either o

SUBMITTER: Rosen S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3184092 | biostudies-literature | 2011

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature