CNL Lunch Talks

Maria Chait

Brain Mechanisms of Speech Segmentation

Thursday October 16th 2003, 12:30 PM, 3416 Marie Mount Hall

A growing body of research in speech processing is pointing to the perceptual reality of both ~40ms and ~300ms windows of integration that correspond to the extraction of segmental and suprasegmental information from a speech stream. In this work we propose a new method of systematically examining the extraction and subsequent combination of these informational constituents of speech.

The current study demonstrates that intelligibility crucially depends on both the slowly varying as well as the rapidly varying components of speech and suggests a binding process, in which a conjunction of these creates an emergent representation that forms the basis for successful speech processing.  Furthermore, by introducing a time shift in the onset of S_low relative to S_high we are able to directly investigate the properties of this binding mechanism.