Speech coding in the auditory nerve: II. Processing schemes for vowel-like sounds

Abstract

Several processing schemes by which phonetically important information for vowels can be extracted from responses of auditory-nerve fibers are analyzed. The schemes are based on power spectra of period histograms obtained in response to a set of nine two-formant, steady-state, vowel-like stimuli presented at 60 and 75 dB SPL. One class of "local filtering" schemes, which was originally proposed by Young and Sachs [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 66, 1381-1403 (1979)], consists of analyzing response patterns by filters centered at the characteristic frequencies (CF) of the fibers, so that a tonotopically arranged measure of synchronized response can be obtained. Various schemes in this class differ in the characteristics of the filter. For a wide range of filter bandwidths, formant frequencies correspond approximately to the CFs for which the response measure is maximal. If in addition, the bandwidths of the analyzing filters are made compatible with psychophysical measures of frequency selectivity, low-frequency harmonics of the stimulus fundamental are resolved in the output profile, so that fundamental frequency can also be estimated. In a second class of processing schemes, a dominant response component is defined for each fiber from a 1/6 octave spectral representation of the response pattern, and the formant frequencies are estimated from the most frequent values of the dominant component in the ensemble of auditory-nerve fibers. The local filtering schemes and the dominant component schemes can be related to "place" and "periodicity" models of auditory processing, respectively.