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

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.

Vowel perception in multilingual speakers: ERP evidence from Polish, English and Norwegian

“…This approach revealed an increased negativity in the 100–200 ms time window, which was followed by a late negativity in the 350–800 ms time window. Since use of the 100–200 ms time window is in accordance with Kujala and Näätänen (2003) and the 350–800 ms time window was also previously used in the literature ( Di Dona et al, 2022 ), we used these time windows to measure the effects in the three language conditions separately. The analyzed region of interest was the frontal-central brain area (F3, Fz, F4, FC1, FCz, FC2, C3, Cz, C4), given that both the MMN and LDN effects are typically observed in this scalp site ( Ceponiene et al, 1998 ; Kujala and Näätänen, 2003 ).…”