Multidimensional scaling of English fricatives using the acoustic change complex of electroencephalogram recordings

Abstract

In electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings, there is a characteristic P1-N1-P2 complex after the onset of a sound, and a related complex, called the Acoustic Change Complex (ACC), when there is a change within a sound (e.g., a formant transition between two vowels). In the present study, the ACC was measured for all possible pairs of eight sustained voiced and voiceless English fricatives, in EEG recordings from native speakers of British English. The magnitude of the ACC was used as a similarity measure for multidimensional scaling (MDS), producing a two-dimensional perceptual space that related to both voicing and place of articulation. The results thus demonstrate that this combination of ACC and MDS can be effective for mapping multidimensional phonetic spaces at relatively early levels of auditory processing, which may be useful for evaluating the effects of language experience in adults and infants.