Effects of formant proximity and stimulus prototypicality on the neural discrimination of vowels: Evidence from the auditory frequency-following response

• Main Authors: Kuhl, P.K (Author), Masapollo, M. (Author), Ménard, L. (Author), Polka, L. (Author), Zhao, T.C (Author)
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Academic Press Inc. 2019
• Subjects: adult; Adult; Article; auditory discrimination; Auditory frequency-following response; auditory response; auditory stimulation; Discrimination (Psychology); English (language); experimental study; female; Female; Focal vowels; frequency modulation; human; human experiment; Humans; language processing; male; Male; multilingualism; Multilingualism; Native Language Magnet model; Natural Referent Vowel framework; neurobiology; normal human; perceptive discrimination; phonetics; Phonetics; prediction; speech; Speech Acoustics; speech perception; Speech perception; Speech Perception; vowel
• Online Access: View Fulltext in Publisher

 Cross-language speech perception experiments indicate that for many vowel contrasts, discrimination is easier when the same pair of vowels is presented in one direction compared to the reverse direction. According to one account, these directional asymmetries reflect a universal bias favoring “focal” vowels (i.e., vowels with prominent spectral peaks formed by the convergence of adjacent formants). An alternative account is that such effects reflect an experience-dependent bias favoring prototypical exemplars of native-language vowel categories. Here, we tested the predictions of these accounts by recording the auditory frequency-following response in English-speaking listeners to two synthetic variants of the vowel /u/ that differed in the proximity of their first and second formants and prototypicality, with stimuli arranged in oddball and reversed-oddball blocks. Participants showed evidence of neural discrimination when the more-focal/less-prototypic /u/ served as the deviant stimulus, but not when the less-focal/more-prototypic /u/ served as the deviant, consistent with the focalization account. © 2019 Elsevier Inc.