Recording human evoked potentials that follow the pitch contour of a natural vowel

IEEE Trans Biomed Eng. 2005 Sep;52(9):1614-8. doi: 10.1109/TBME.2005.851499.

Abstract

We investigated whether pitch-synchronous neural activity could be recorded in humans, with a natural vowel and a vowel in which the fundamental frequency was suppressed. Small variations of speech periodicity were detected in the evoked responses using a fine structure spectrograph (FSS). A significant response (P < 0.001) was measured in all seven normal subjects even when the fundamental frequency was suppressed, and it very accurately tracked the acoustic pitch contour (normalized mean absolute error < 0.57%). Small variations in speech periodicity, which humans can detect, are therefore available to the perceptual system as pitch-synchronous neural firing. These findings suggest that the measurement of pitch-evoked responses may be a viable tool for objective speech audiometry.

Publication types

  • Clinical Trial

MeSH terms

  • Adult
  • Aged
  • Algorithms*
  • Audiometry, Evoked Response / methods*
  • Diagnosis, Computer-Assisted / methods*
  • Electroencephalography / methods*
  • Evoked Potentials, Auditory / physiology*
  • Humans
  • Middle Aged
  • Natural Language Processing
  • Pitch Perception / physiology*
  • Semantics
  • Speech Perception / physiology*