Phonological Processing in the Auditory Systems: A new Class of Stimuli And Advances in Fmri Techniques

摘要

It is commonly assumed that, in the cochlea and the brainstem, the auditory system processes speech sounds without differntiating them from any other sounds. At some stage, however, it must treat speech and non-speech sounds differnetly. In broad terms, the purpose of this paper is to consider where this speech specific procesisng begins in the auditory pathway. Specific processing begins in the auditory pathway. Specifically, the paper is concerned with extrapolating the concepts of an auditory model to the point where we can define matched sets of speech and non-speech sounds that can be used in a brain-imaging experimetn to delimit where phonological processing of vowel sounds begins in the auditory system. Pilot results suggest that phonological processing of vowels may beging just outside auditory cortex in Brodmann area 21.