Abstract
It has been demonstrated that vowel information can be extracted from speech sounds without attention focused on them, despite widely varying non-speech acoustic information in the input. The present study tested whether even complex tones that were constructed based on F0, F1 and F2 vowel frequencies to resemble the defining features of speech sounds, but were not speech, are categorized pre-attentively according to vowel space information. The Mismatch Negativity brain response was elicited by infrequent tokens of the complex tones, showing that the auditory system can pre-attentively categorize speech information on the basis of the minimal, defining auditory features. The human mind extracts the language-relevant information from complex tones despite the non-relevant variation in the sound input.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 473-479 |
Number of pages | 7 |
Journal | Cognitive Brain Research |
Volume | 20 |
Issue number | 3 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Aug 2004 |
Keywords
- Auditory sensory memory
- Cognition
- Event-related potentials
- Formant structure
- Mismatch negativity
- Neural basis of behavior
- Phonemes
- Speech perception
- Vowels
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
- Cognitive Neuroscience
- Behavioral Neuroscience