Simple Acoustic Features Can Explain Phoneme-Based Predictions of Cortical Responses to Speech.

ABSTRACT: When we listen to speech, we have to make sense of a waveform of sound pressure. Hierarchical models of speech perception assume that, to extract semantic meaning, the signal is transformed into unknown, intermediate neuronal representations. Traditionally, studies of such intermediate representations are guided by linguistically defined concepts, such as phonemes. Here, we argue that in order to arrive at an unbiased understanding of the neuronal responses to speech, we should focus instead on representations obtained directly from the stimulus. We illustrate our view with a data-driven, information theoretic analysis of a dataset of 24 young, healthy humans who listened to a 1 h narrative while their magnetoencephalogram (MEG) was recorded. We find that two recent results, the improved p

SUBMITTER: Daube C 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6584359 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature