Abstract
Psychophysical and physiological studies have demonstrated selectivity for spectral envelope frequency (also termed spatial frequency) in the auditory system, suggesting that auditory perception of complex sounds might be based on spectral envelope channels. The present study investigated relative contribution of different spatial frequencies to vowel identification. Twelve naturally-spoken American-English vowels were presented at 70 dB SPL. In different conditions, vowel stimuli were subjected to various degrees of low-pass and high-pass filtering in the spatial frequency domain, in effect, altering their spectra. Identification performance for the vowels with and without spatial frequency filtering was estimated for normal-hearing listeners. Results indicated that vowel identification performance was progressively degraded as spatial-frequency components were removed. Results will be interpreted in terms of spatial frequency regions most important to specific vowel categories. The specificity and universality of spatial frequency modulations in vowel identification across different vowel categories will be discussed.
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