Abstract
A recent commentary (Oscillators and syllables: a cautionary note. Cummins, 2012) questions the validity of a class of speech perception models inspired by the possible role of neuronal oscillations in decoding speech (e.g., Ghitza, 2011; Giraud and Poeppel, 2012). In arguing against the approach, Cummins raises a cautionary flag “from a phonetician's point of view.” Here we respond to his arguments from an auditory processing viewpoint, referring to a phenomenological model of Ghitza (2011) taken as a representative of the criticized approach. We shall conclude by proposing the theta-syllable as an information unit defined by cortical function—an alternative to the conventional, ambiguously defined syllable. In the large context, the resulting discussion debate should be viewed as a subtext of acoustic and auditory phonetics vs. articulatory and motor theories of speech reception.
Highlights
A recent commentary (Oscillators and syllables: a cautionary note. Cummins, 2012) questions the validity of a class of speech perception models inspired by the possible role of neuronal oscillations in decoding speech (e.g., Ghitza, 2011; Giraud and Poeppel, 2012)
Anchored at a phonetician viewpoint, a recent commentary (Cummins, 2012) questions the validity of a class of speech perception models inspired by the possible role of neuronal oscillations in decoding speech (e.g., Ghitza, 2011; Giraud and Poeppel, 2012)
Cummins’ skepticism is in the following three respects: (1) since speech acoustics is all but temporally periodic, speech perception models with oscillations at the core are unfounded, (2) oscillation-based models do not have the structure necessary to decode the rich spectro-temporal information in the acoustics, and (3) oscillation-based models are not required in order to account for the role of speaker-hearer synchronization during the decoding process
Summary
A recent commentary (Oscillators and syllables: a cautionary note. Cummins, 2012) questions the validity of a class of speech perception models inspired by the possible role of neuronal oscillations in decoding speech (e.g., Ghitza, 2011; Giraud and Poeppel, 2012). In an attempt to account for counterintuitive behavioral findings on the intelligibility of time-compressed speech as a function of “repackaging” rate (Ghitza and Greenberg, 2009; see Figure 1), a cortical computation principle was proposed according to which the speech decoding process is performed within a time-varying, hierarchical window structure synchronized with the input (Ghitza, 2011).
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