Abstract
Young and Sachs (1979) have shown, in their classical paper on the processing of information on complex vowels in the auditory nerve, how well spectral structure of complex stimuli is retained in temporal aspects of the discharge patterns of populations of single auditory-nerve fibers. They showed that suppression must play an important role in the preservation of the formant structure. In a recent study on the coding of spectral fine structure of complex stimuli in single fibers (Horst et al., 1986a), we were also struck by strong nonlinear aspects of the responses. In order to investigate the mechanisms involved in these nonlinear responses we employed a class of complex stimuli that elicited strongly different nonlinear responses with relatively small changes in the spectral domain. The present paper reports on the responses to one type of stimulus. It is based on a flat spectral envelope. However, the center component is raised in level with respect to the other components, thus simulating a highly simplified formant. We will show that the nonlinear responses agree with Young and Sachs’ data and can be explained by the action of a compressive nonlinearity.
This work was supported by grant NS-14880 to EJ by NINCDS and a grant to JWH by the Netherlands Organization for the Advancement of Pure Research. P. Hoepfner and W.F. Cleary assisted in collecting and analyzing the data. A. Mensink skillfully prepared the figures.
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© 1987 Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, Dordrecht
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Horst, J.W., Javel, E., Farley, G.R. (1987). Nonlinear Responses in the Auditory Nerve to Vowel-Related Complex Stimuli. In: Schouten, M.E.H. (eds) The Psychophysics of Speech Perception. NATO ASI Series, vol 39. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-3629-4_31
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-3629-4_31
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