Topic: phonemes

Animal vocal sequences including human speech are organized into hierarchical sequences composed of voice primitives. In human speech, these primitives are known as phonemes or phones. By contrast, the corresponding vocal primitives in animals have been poorly studied. What sets of vocal gestures span the vocal repertoire of an animal and what regularities apply to animal vocal repertoires across individuals and across species? In birdsong, the roughly hundred-millisecond long song syllables are often considered basic vocal units, since syllables display little acoustic variability within t

The sound structures that convey meaning in speech such as phonemes and words vary widely in their duration. As a consequence, integrating across absolute time (e.g., 100 ms) and sound structure (e.g., phonemes) reflect fundamentally distinct neural computations. Auditory and cognitive models have often cast neural integration in terms of time and structure, respectively, but whether neural computations in the auditory cortex reflect time or structure remains unknown. To answer this question, we rescaled the duration of all speech structures using time stretching/compression and measured integ