The role of attention in discrimination of vowels based on different spectral attributes

Event Abstract Back to Event The role of attention in discrimination of vowels based on different spectral attributes Jyrki Tuomainen1, 2*, J. Savela3, J. Obleser4 and O. Aaltonen5 1 Logopedics, Ĺbo Akademi University, Finland 2 UCL Research Department of Speech, Hearing and Phonetic Sciences, University College London, United Kingdom 3 Department of Information Technology, University of Turku, Finland 4 Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Germany 5 Department of Speech Sciences, University of Helsinki, Finland Speech contains a variety of acoustic cues to phonetic contrasts that are exploited by the listener in decoding the acoustic signal. In three experiments, we tried to elucidate whether listeners rely on formant peak frequencies, whole spectrum representations or phonological features when they discriminate vowels. Experiment I investigated discrimination performance when listeners made speeded responses to vowel targets from two synthetic continua. The results indicated that the performance of the listeners was based on the whole spectrum attributes of the vowel, and not on formant peaks or distinctive features. Experiment II showed that when the vowel targets were presented in noise eliminating the differences in the spectral moments between continua the subjects employed formant peak frequencies. In Experiment III using the same stimuli as in Experiment I, we measured an automatic brain response, the mismatch negativity (MMN), when subjects did not attend to the auditory stimuli. Results showed that the MMN was sensitive only to the formant structure of the vowels. We suggest that the auditory cortex automatically and pre-attentively encodes formant peak frequencies, whereas attention can allocate resources for processing additional spectral information, which enhances vowel discrimination. Conference: MMN 09 Fifth Conference on Mismatch Negativity (MMN) and its Clinical and Scientific Applications, Budapest, Hungary, 4 Apr - 7 Apr, 2009. Presentation Type: Poster Presentation Topic: Poster Presentations Citation: Tuomainen J, Savela J, Obleser J and Aaltonen O (2009). The role of attention in discrimination of vowels based on different spectral attributes. Conference Abstract: MMN 09 Fifth Conference on Mismatch Negativity (MMN) and its Clinical and Scientific Applications. doi: 10.3389/conf.neuro.09.2009.05.090 Copyright: The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers. They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters. The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated. Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed. For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions. Received: 25 Mar 2009; Published Online: 25 Mar 2009. * Correspondence: Jyrki Tuomainen, Logopedics, Ĺbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland, j.tuomainen@ucl.ac.uk Login Required This action requires you to be registered with Frontiers and logged in. To register or login click here. Abstract Info Abstract The Authors in Frontiers Jyrki Tuomainen J. Savela J. Obleser O. Aaltonen Google Jyrki Tuomainen J. Savela J. Obleser O. Aaltonen Google Scholar Jyrki Tuomainen J. Savela J. Obleser O. Aaltonen PubMed Jyrki Tuomainen J. Savela J. Obleser O. Aaltonen Related Article in Frontiers Google Scholar PubMed Abstract Close Back to top Javascript is disabled. Please enable Javascript in your browser settings in order to see all the content on this page.