HOME HELP FEEDBACK SUBSCRIPTIONS ARCHIVE SEARCH TABLE OF CONTENTS		QUICK SEARCH:   [advanced] Author: Keyword(s): Year:  Vol:  Page:

This Article Full Text Full Text (PDF) Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Similar articles in this journal Similar articles in PubMed Alert me to new issues of the journal Download to citation manager Citing Articles Citing Articles via HighWire Citing Articles via Google Scholar Google Scholar Articles by Alain, C. Articles by Lobaugh, N. Search for Related Content PubMed PubMed Citation Articles by Alain, C. Articles by Lobaugh, N.

Hearing Two Things at Once: Neurophysiological Indices of Speech Segregation and Identification

¹ Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care, Ontario, ² University of Toronto, ³ Sunnybrook and Women's College Health Sciences Centre, Ontario, Canada

Reprint requests should be sent to Claude Alain, PhD, Rotman Research Institute, Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care, 3560 Bathurst Street, Toronto, Ontario, M6A 2E1, or via e-mail: calain{at}rotman-baycrest.on.ca.

The discrimination of concurrent sounds is paramount to speech perception. During social gatherings, listeners must extract information from a composite acoustic wave, which sums multiple individual voices that are simultaneously active. The observers' ability to identify two simultaneously presented vowels improves with increasing separation between the fundamental frequencies (f₀) of the two vowels. Event-related potentials to stimuli presented during attend and ignore conditions revealed activity between 130 and 170 msec after sound onset that reflected the f₀ differences between the two vowels. Another, more posterior and right-lateralized, negative wave maximal at 250 msec, and a central-parietal slow negativity were observed only during vowel identification and may index stimulus categorization. This sequence of neural events supports a multistage model of auditory scene analysis in which the spectral pattern of each vowel constituent is automatically extracted and then matched against representations of those vowels in working memory.

This article has been cited by other articles:

				D. G. Sinex and H. Li Responses of Inferior Colliculus Neurons to Double Harmonic Tones J Neurophysiol, December 1, 2007; 98(6): 3171 - 3184. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

				C. Alain, J. S. Snyder, Y. He, and K. S. Reinke Changes in Auditory Cortex Parallel Rapid Perceptual Learning Cereb Cortex, May 1, 2007; 17(5): 1074 - 1084. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]