Temporal Aspects of Speech: The Encoding of Naturally Produced and Spectrally Reduced Synthetic Speech by the Auditory Nerve

Abstract

The physiological results demonstrated that sufficient information is contained within the firing patterns of the auditory nerve to uniquely identify stop consonants even when the spectral cues are significantly degraded. Furthermore, these patterns are consistent with the psychoacoustic findings, in that stimuli that produced greater pattern similarity to the natural responses were recognized with higher accuracy. These findings further support the hypothesis that temporal information is integral to speech perception.