NEUROPHYSIOLOGICAL BASIS OF SPEECH PERCEPTION

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This subproject is one of many research subprojects utilizing the resources provided by a Center grant funded by NIH/NCRR. The subproject and investigator (PI) may have received primary funding from another NIH source, and thus could be represented in other CRISP entries. The institution listed is for the Center, which is not necessarily the institution for the investigator. The objective of this project is to identify the neurophysiological processes underlying perception of speech phonemes. Phonemes are complex spectrotemporal acoustic patterns that carry the linguistic information in speech. A principal defining characteristic of these sounds is that they are perceived categorically. That is, different acoustic stimuli tend to be grouped into perceptual categories (phonemes), resulting in better discrimination across than within category boundaries. Our main hypothesis is that the degree of left-hemispheric dominance observed during processing of speech phonemes is related to their categorical perception rather than to any special status as speech sounds. We hypothesize that the left hemisphere is specialized for categorical perception of sounds, both speech and nonspeech, whereas the right hemisphere is specialized for continuous discrimination of sounds.