Journal
PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY B-BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES
Volume 363, Issue 1493, Pages 923-945Publisher
ROYAL SOC
DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2007.2151
Keywords
auditory nerve; tonotopic; speech; discrimination; inferior colliculus; auditory cortex
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Funding
- NIDCD NIH HHS [R01 DC000109, R01 DC000115] Funding Source: Medline
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Speech is the most interesting and one of the most complex sounds dealt with by the auditory system. The neural representation of speech needs to capture those features of the signal on which the brain depends in language communication. Here we describe the representation of speech in the auditory nerve and in a few sites in the central nervous system from the perspective of the neural coding of important aspects of the signal. The representation is tonotopic, meaning that the speech signal is decomposed by frequency and different frequency components are represented in different populations of neurons. Essential to the representation are the properties of frequency tuning and nonlinear suppression. Tuning creates the decomposition of the signal by frequency, and nonlinear suppression is essential for maintaining the representation across sound levels. The representation changes in central auditory neurons by becoming more robust against changes in stimulus intensity and more transient. However, it is probable that the form of the representation at the auditory cortex is fundamentally different from that at lower levels, in that stimulus features other than the distribution of energy across frequency are analysed.
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