title: Reverberation impairs brainstem temporal representations of voiced vowel sounds: challenging "periodicity-tagged" segregation of competing speech in rooms.
abstract: The auditory system typically processes information from concurrently active sound sources (e.g., two voices speaking at once), in the presence of multiple delayed, attenuated and distorted sound-wave reflections (reverberation). Brainstem circuits help segregate these complex acoustic mixtures into "auditory objects." Psychophysical studies demonstrate a strong interaction between reverberation and fundamental-frequency (F0) modulation, leading to impaired segregation of competing vowels when segregation is on the basis of F0 differences. Neurophysiological studies of complex-sound segregation have concentrated on sounds with steady F0s, in anechoic environments. However, F0 modulation and reverberation are quasi-ubiquitous. We examine the ability of 129 single units in the ventral cochlear nucleus (VCN) of the anesthetized guinea pig to segregate the concurrent synthetic vowel sounds /a/ and /i/, based on temporal discharge patterns under closed-field conditions. We address the effects of added real-room reverberation, F0 modulation, and the interaction of these two factors, on brainstem neural segregation of voiced speech sounds. A firing-rate representation of single-vowels' spectral envelopes is robust to the combination of F0 modulation and reverberation: local firing-rate maxima and minima across the tonotopic array code vowel-formant structure. However, single-vowel F0-related periodicity information in shuffled inter-spike interval distributions is significantly degraded in the combined presence of reverberation and F0 modulation. Hence, segregation of double-vowels' spectral energy into two streams (corresponding to the two vowels), on the basis of temporal discharge patterns, is impaired by reverberation; specifically when F0 is modulated. All unit types (primary-like, chopper, onset) are similarly affected. These results offer neurophysiological insights to perceptual organization of complex acoustic scenes under realistically challenging listening conditions.
authors: Centre for the Neural Basis of Hearing, The Physiological Laboratory, Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience, University of Cambridge Cambridge, UK.
authors: Mark
authors: M
authors: Sayles
authors: Centre for the Neural Basis of Hearing, The Physiological Laboratory, Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience, University of Cambridge Cambridge, UK.
authors: Arkadiusz
authors: A
authors: Stasiak
authors: Centre for the Neural Basis of Hearing, The Physiological Laboratory, Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience, University of Cambridge Cambridge, UK.
authors: Ian M
authors: IM
authors: Winter
keywords: auditory scene analysis; cochlear nucleus; double vowels; pitch; reverberation; vowel
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