A controversial issue in neurolinguistics is whether basic neural auditory representations found in many animals can account for human perception of speech. This question was addressed by examining how a population of neurons in the primary auditory cortex (A1) of the naïve awake ferret encodes phonemes and whether this representation could account for the human ability to discriminate them. When neural responses were characterized and ordered by spectral tuning and dynamics, perceptually significant features including formant patterns in vowels and place and manner of articulation in consonants, were readily visualized by activity in distinct neural subpopulations. Furthermore, these responses faithfully encoded the similarity between the acoustic features of these phonemes. A simple classifier trained on the neural representation was able to simulate human phoneme confusion when tested with novel exemplars. These results suggest that A1 responses are sufficiently rich to encode and discriminate phoneme classes and that humans and animals may build upon the same general acoustic representations to learn boundaries for categorical and robust sound classification.
Skip Nav Destination
Article navigation
February 2008
February 01 2008
Phoneme representation and classification in primary auditory cortex
Nima Mesgarani;
Nima Mesgarani
Electrical and Computer Engineering & Institute for Systems Research,
University of Maryland
, College Park, Maryland 20742
Search for other works by this author on:
Stephen V. David;
Stephen V. David
Electrical and Computer Engineering & Institute for Systems Research,
University of Maryland
, College Park, Maryland 20742
Search for other works by this author on:
Jonathan B. Fritz;
Jonathan B. Fritz
Electrical and Computer Engineering & Institute for Systems Research,
University of Maryland
, College Park, Maryland 20742
Search for other works by this author on:
Shihab A. Shamma
Shihab A. Shamma
a)
Electrical and Computer Engineering & Institute for Systems Research,
University of Maryland
, College Park, Maryland 20742
Search for other works by this author on:
a)
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed. Electronic mail: sas@isr.umd.edu
J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 123, 899–909 (2008)
Article history
Received:
June 05 2007
Accepted:
October 30 2007
Citation
Nima Mesgarani, Stephen V. David, Jonathan B. Fritz, Shihab A. Shamma; Phoneme representation and classification in primary auditory cortex. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 1 February 2008; 123 (2): 899–909. https://doi.org/10.1121/1.2816572
Download citation file:
Sign in
Don't already have an account? Register
Sign In
You could not be signed in. Please check your credentials and make sure you have an active account and try again.
Sign in via your Institution
Sign in via your InstitutionPay-Per-View Access
$40.00