TY - JOUR
T1 - Auditory cortex accesses phonological categories
T2 - An MEG mismatch study
AU - Phillips, Colin
AU - Pellathy, Thomas
AU - Marantz, Alec
AU - Yellin, Elron
AU - Wexler, Kenneth
AU - Poeppel, David
AU - McGinnis, Martha
AU - Roberts, Timothy
N1 - Copyright:
Copyright 2012 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
PY - 2000
Y1 - 2000
N2 - The studies presented here use an adapted oddball paradigm to show evidence that representations of discrete phonological categories are available to the human auditory cortex. Brain activity was recorded using a 37-channel biomagnetometer while eight subjects listened passively to synthetic speech sounds. In the phonological condition, which contrasted stimuli from an acoustic /dæ/-/tæ/ continuum, a magnetic mismatch field (MMF) was elicited in a sequence of stimuli in which phonological categories occurred in a many-to-one ratio, but no acoustic many-to-one ratio was present. In order to isolate the contribution of phonological categories to the MMF responses, the acoustic parameter of voice onset time, which distinguished standard and deviant stimuli, was also varied within the standard and deviant categories. No MMF was elicited in the acoustic condition, in which the acoustic distribution of stimuli was identical to the first experiment, but the many-to-one distribution of phonological categories was removed. The design of these studies makes it possible to demonstrate the all-or-nothing property of phonological category membership. This approach contrasts with a number of previous studies of phonetic perception using the mismatch paradigm, which have demonstrated the graded property of enhanced acoustic discrimination at or near phonetic category boundaries.
AB - The studies presented here use an adapted oddball paradigm to show evidence that representations of discrete phonological categories are available to the human auditory cortex. Brain activity was recorded using a 37-channel biomagnetometer while eight subjects listened passively to synthetic speech sounds. In the phonological condition, which contrasted stimuli from an acoustic /dæ/-/tæ/ continuum, a magnetic mismatch field (MMF) was elicited in a sequence of stimuli in which phonological categories occurred in a many-to-one ratio, but no acoustic many-to-one ratio was present. In order to isolate the contribution of phonological categories to the MMF responses, the acoustic parameter of voice onset time, which distinguished standard and deviant stimuli, was also varied within the standard and deviant categories. No MMF was elicited in the acoustic condition, in which the acoustic distribution of stimuli was identical to the first experiment, but the many-to-one distribution of phonological categories was removed. The design of these studies makes it possible to demonstrate the all-or-nothing property of phonological category membership. This approach contrasts with a number of previous studies of phonetic perception using the mismatch paradigm, which have demonstrated the graded property of enhanced acoustic discrimination at or near phonetic category boundaries.
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U2 - 10.1162/08989290051137567
DO - 10.1162/08989290051137567
M3 - Article
C2 - 11177423
AN - SCOPUS:0034541299
SN - 0898-929X
VL - 12
SP - 1038
EP - 1055
JO - Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
JF - Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
IS - 6
ER -