Effects of Various Articulatory Features of Speech on Cortical Event-Related Potentials and Behavioral Measures of Speech-Sound Processing

Abstract

The larger response amplitudes and earlier latencies for the cortical ERPs to the vowel versus consonant stimuli are likely related, in part, to the large spectral differences present in these speech contrasts. The measurements of response strength (amplitudes and d-prime scores) and response timing (ERP and RT latencies) for the various cortical ERPs suggest that the brain may have an easier task processing the steady state information present in the vowel stimuli in comparison with the rapidly changing formant transitions in the consonant stimuli.

Effects of Speech Phonological Features during Passive Perception on Cortical Auditory Evoked Potential in Sensorineural Hearing Loss

“…Thus, each stimulus contrasts yielding a total of 800 stimuli containing 160 deviant stimuli and 640 standard stimuli replicated over the two runs. Counterbalanced paradigm was implemented in this study where one token acted once as a deviant in one run and once as standard in another run for each set of CVs stimuli respectively (Duncan et al 2009;Korczak & Stapells 2010). Figure 1 shows the spectrogram of three associated CV tokens that were used in the present study.…”

“…These consonant-vowel (CV) speech stimuli respectively were presented at 80 dB sound pressure level (SPL) to accommodate both degree of SNHL (Korczak & Stapells 2010). The natural digitizing speech tokens were produced by a female Malaysian Malay native speaker and the speech tokens were recorded at 44,100 Hz sampling frequency.…”

“…The speech acoustic phonological features such as voice/ voiceless distinction, place and manner of articulation provide a crucial complexity mapping mechanism which creates a stable neuronal representation in the human auditory system (Anderson et al 2013;Korczak & Stapells 2010). The significant of speech perception for passive condition is evident in peoples suffering from sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL), whose impaired speech articulatory selectivity and discrimination contribute to the difficulty in understanding speech (Boothroyd 1993;Siti ZamratolMai Sarah et al 2016;Oates et al 2002;Wunderlich & Cone-Wesson 2001).…”

“…Former studies used speech sound varied along the acoustic continuum of voice-onset-time (VOT) (Tremblay et al 2003) and frequency spectral (Korczak & Stapells 2010) and reported different effects on CAEP components amplitude and latency. The present study extended the previous works by evaluating the amplitude and latency of CAEP components in SNHL subjects using Malay complex sound, i.e.…”

“…For the last six years, depth exploration was done by Korczak and Stapells (2010) to understand the effects of three articulatory features of speech including vowelspace contrast, place of articulation and voice/voiceless discrimination on normal subjects. They reported that the brain may have a difficult task in discriminating consonant stimuli as compared to vowel stimuli due to rapidly transition of formant frequencies.…”