Medicine and Health Sciences Commons^™

Neural Coding Of Natural And Synthetic Speech., Allison Brown

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The present study examined whether natural and synthetic speech are differentially encoded in the auditory cortex. Auditory event-related potential (ERP) waveforms were elicited by natural and synthetic fricative-vowel stimuli (/sɑ/ and /ʃɑ/) in a passive listening paradigm in adult listeners with normal hearing. ERP response components were compared across conditions. The results indicated that peak latencies to natural speech were significantly earlier than those to synthetic speech. Natural speech also produced significant electrode hemisphere site effects, whereas synthetic speech activated left, midline, and right electrode hemisphere sites equally. Overall, the results suggest that cortical processing of natural and synthetic speech …