Physiological evidence for a temporal processing mechanism underlying voice-onset time (VOT) encoding

Abstract

Despite decades of psychoacoustical research, the detailed neural mechanisms underlying VOT encoding remain obscure. Evidence collected from direct recordings in auditory cortex of human subjects undergoing surgical evaluation for medically intractable epilepsy, and from primary auditory cortex in monkeys, supports a temporal processing mechanism as a principal means by which VOT is encoded by the brain. This mechanism, as proposed by Pisoni [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 77, 1352–1361 (1977)], argues that the perceptual discrimination of voiced from unvoiced stop consonants is based, in part, on whether consonant release and voicing onset are perceived as occurring simultaneously or sequentially. Neural activity in auditory cortex offers physiologically plausible parallels to this perceptual scheme that can help account for the distribution of typical VOT values used by the majority of the world’s languages, categorical perception of VOT, and perceptual boundary shifts that occur with changes in stop-consonant place of articulation and when nonspeech analogs of VOT are used. These responses in primary auditory cortex are poised to provide powerful inputs to later processing areas, where they can be integrated with other acoustical, visual, and language-related inputs known to modulate VOT perception. [Work supported by DC00657 and DC00120.]