We describe the representation of synthetic stop-consonants in a computational model of the mammalian dorsal cochlear nucleus. The speech stimuli have different values of voice-onset time (VOT) and are labelled by adult listeners as either /ga/ or /ka/, with a phonetic boundary at 44 ms VOT. The responses of the model's Type IV units to these stimuli also fall into two clear categories with a boundary at 45 ms VOT. These results provide evidence that the categorical perception of voicing in initial English stops - observed in behavioural experiments using human subjects (infant and adult) and chinchillas - may arise as a consequence of the representation of these sounds in the mammalian auditory nervous system at the level of the dorsal acoustic stria.
Cite as: Pont, M.J., Damper, R.I. (1989) A possible neural basis for the categorical perception of the English voiced/voiceless contrast. Proc. First European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology (Eurospeech 1989), 1239-1242, doi: 10.21437/Eurospeech.1989-61
@inproceedings{pont89_eurospeech,
author={M. J. Pont and Robert I. Damper},
title={{A possible neural basis for the categorical perception of the English voiced/voiceless contrast}},
year=1989,
booktitle={Proc. First European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology (Eurospeech 1989)},
pages={1239--1242},
doi={10.21437/Eurospeech.1989-61}
}