Topic: Speech perception

Speech may be characterized as conveying both segmental information (i.e., about vowels and consonants) as well as suprasegmental information - cued through pitch, intensity, and duration - also known as the prosody of speech. In this contribution, I will argue that prosody shapes low-level speech perception, changing which speech sounds we hear. Perhaps the most notable example of how prosody guides word recognition is the phenomenon of lexical stress, whereby suprasegmental F0, intensity, and duration cues can distinguish otherwise segmentally identical words, such as "PLAto" vs. "plaTEAU" i

Temporal predictions are fundamental instruments for facilitating sensory selection, allowing humans to exploit regularities in the world. Recent evidence indicates that the motor system instantiates predictive timing mechanisms, helping to synchronize temporal fluctuations of attention with the timing of events in a task-relevant stream, thus facilitating sensory selection. Accordingly, in the auditory domain auditory-motor interactions are observed during perception of speech and music, two temporally structured sensory streams. I will present a behavioral and neurophysiological account for

The processing of temporal sound features is fundamental to hearing, and the auditory system displays a plethora of specializations, at many levels, to enable such processing. Octopus neurons are the most extreme temporally-specialized cells in the auditory (and perhaps entire) brain, which make them intriguing but also difficult to study. Notwithstanding the scant physiological data, these neurons have been a favorite cell type of modeling studies which have proposed that octopus cells have critical roles in pitch and speech perception. We used a range of in vivo recording and labeling method