NEUROPHYSIOLOGICAL BASIS OF SPEECH PERCEPTION

本子项目是利用由NIH/NCRR资助的中心赠款提供的资源的众多研究子项目之一。子项目和研究者（PI）可能已经从另一个NIH来源获得了主要资金，因此可以在其他CRISP条目中表示。列出的机构是中心的，不一定是研究者的机构。本项目的目的是确定语音音素感知的神经生理过程。音素是复杂的分谱时间声学模式，它在言语中携带语言信息。这些声音的一个主要特征是它们是被分类感知的。也就是说，不同的声音刺激倾向于被归为感知类别（音素），从而导致跨类别比类别边界内更好的区分。我们的主要假设是，在语音音素处理过程中观察到的左半球优势程度与他们的分类感知有关，而不是作为语音的任何特殊地位。我们假设左脑半球专门负责声音的分类感知，包括语音和非语音，而右脑半球专门负责声音的连续辨别。

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.