Neural mechanisms supporting robust discrimination of spectrally and temporally degraded speech.

ABSTRACT: Cochlear implants provide good speech discrimination ability despite highly limited amount of information they transmit compared with normal cochlea. Noise vocoded speech, simulating cochlear implants in normal hearing listeners, have demonstrated that spectrally and temporally degraded speech contains sufficient cues to provide accurate speech discrimination. We hypothesized that neural activity patterns generated in the primary auditory cortex by spectrally and temporally degraded speech sounds will account for the robust behavioral discrimination of speech. We examined the behavioral discrimination of noise vocoded consonants and vowels by rats and recorded neural activity patterns from rat primary auditory cortex (A1) for the same sounds. We report the first evidence of behavioral disc

SUBMITTER: Ranasinghe KG 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3387312 | biostudies-literature | 2012 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature