Formant-invariant voice and pitch representations are pre-attentively formed from constantly varying speech and non-speech stimuli

2Citations
Citations of this article
9Readers
Mendeley users who have this article in their library.

This article is free to access.

Abstract

The present study investigated whether listeners can form abstract voice representations while ignoring constantly changing phonological information and if they can use the resulting information to facilitate voice change detection. Further, the study aimed at understanding whether the use of abstraction is restricted to the speech domain or can be deployed also in non-speech contexts. We ran an electroencephalogram (EEG) experiment including one passive and one active oddball task, each featuring a speech and a rotated speech condition. In the speech condition, participants heard constantly changing vowels uttered by a male speaker (standard stimuli) which were infrequently replaced by vowels uttered by a female speaker with higher pitch (deviant stimuli). In the rotated speech condition, participants heard rotated vowels, in which the natural formant structure of speech was disrupted. In the passive task, the mismatch negativity was elicited after the presentation of the deviant voice in both conditions, indicating that listeners could successfully group together different stimuli into a formant-invariant voice representation. In the active task, participants showed shorter reaction times (RTs), higher accuracy and a larger P3b in the speech condition with respect to the rotated speech condition. Results showed that whereas at a pre-attentive level the cognitive system can track pitch regularities while presumably ignoring constantly changing formant information both in speech and in rotated speech, at an attentive level the use of such information is facilitated for speech. This facilitation was also testified by a stronger synchronisation in the theta band (4–7 Hz), potentially pointing towards differences in encoding/retrieval processes.

Cite

CITATION STYLE

APA

Di Dona, G., Scaltritti, M., & Sulpizio, S. (2022). Formant-invariant voice and pitch representations are pre-attentively formed from constantly varying speech and non-speech stimuli. European Journal of Neuroscience, 56(3), 4086–4106. https://doi.org/10.1111/ejn.15730

Register to see more suggestions

Mendeley helps you to discover research relevant for your work.

Already have an account?

Save time finding and organizing research with Mendeley

Sign up for free