Voice perception: Sex, pitch, and the right hemisphere

Lattner, Sonja; Meyer, Martin; Friederici, Angela D.

doi:10.1002/hbm.20065

Cited by 155 publications

(129 citation statements)

References 43 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

106

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…lateralized, presumably nonprimary, AC region on alHG (Riecke et al, 2011a) that may be sensitive to vocal pitch (Lattner et al, 2005). Consistently, this region revealed offset suppression associated with vowel restoration in our study.…”

Section: Auditory Restoration Of Complex Sound Featuressupporting

confidence: 89%

Hearing an Illusory Vowel in Noise: Suppression of Auditory Cortical Activity

Riecke¹,

Vanbussel

Hausfeld

et al. 2012

Journal of Neuroscience

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Human hearing is constructive. For example, when a voice is partially replaced by an extraneous sound (e.g., on the telephone due to a transmission problem), the auditory system may restore the missing portion so that the voice can be perceived as continuous (Miller and Licklider, 1950; for review, see Bregman, 1990; Warren, 1999). The neural mechanisms underlying this continuity illusion have been studied mostly with schematic stimuli (e.g., simple tones) and are still a matter of debate (for review, see Petkov and Sutter, 2011). The goal of the present study was to elucidate how these mechanisms operate under more natural conditions. Using psychophysics and electroencephalography (EEG), we assessed simultaneously the perceived continuity of a human vowel sound through interrupting noise and the concurrent neural activity. We found that vowel continuity illusions were accompanied by a suppression of the 4 Hz EEG power in auditory cortex (AC) that was evoked by the vowel interruption. This suppression was stronger than the suppression accompanying continuity illusions of a simple tone. Finally, continuity perception and 4 Hz power depended on the intactness of the sound that preceded the vowel (i.e., the auditory context). These findings show that a natural sound may be restored during noise due to the suppression of 4 Hz AC activity evoked early during the noise. This mechanism may attenuate sudden pitch changes, adapt the resistance of the auditory system to extraneous sounds across auditory scenes, and provide a useful model for assisted hearing devices.

show abstract

Section: Auditory Restoration Of Complex Sound Featuressupporting

confidence: 89%

Hearing an Illusory Vowel in Noise: Suppression of Auditory Cortical Activity

Riecke¹,

Vanbussel

Hausfeld

et al. 2012

Journal of Neuroscience

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Similar regions in pSTG, particularly in the left hemisphere, have been associated with the encoding of acoustic properties of speech (for review, see Hickok and Poeppel, 2000;Scott, 2005), such as voice formants (Lattner et al, 2005) and speech onsets or offsets (Celsis et al, 1999;Jancke et al, 1999;Harms et al, 2005). A region in the left middle temporal gyrus that has been associated with continuity illusions of complex sounds (see Introduction) showed a similar activity pattern in our study as the region we identified in pSTG (supplemental Fig.…”

Section: Acoustic Analysis Of Complex Sounds In Posterior Temporal Cosupporting

confidence: 81%

“…Second, in the literature, the alHG and surrounding superior temporal regions have been implicated in the analysis of paralinguistic aspects of voices such as pitch (Belin et al, 2002;Warren and Griffiths, 2003;Barrett and Hall, 2006), salience (Warren et al, 2005), and intelligibility (Davis and Johnsrude, 2003;Liebenthal et al, 2005;Scott et al, 2006). Specifically the right alHG in non-PAC has been suggested to play a role in extracting the pitch of intact natural voices (Lattner et al, 2005) and synthetic broadband sounds (Patterson et al, 2002;Penagos et al, 2004). The region that we identified in right alHG fits well with these previously reported pitch-sensitive regions (average Euclidean distance in Talairach space, 10 mm), suggesting that pitch representations were involved in the present continuity illusions.…”

Section: Sound Representations In Ac Supporting Continuity Illusionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tracking Vocal Pitch through Noise: Neural Correlates in Nonprimary Auditory Cortex

et al. 2011

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In natural environments, a sound can be heard as stable despite the presence of other occasionally louder sounds. For example, when a portion in a voice is replaced by masking noise, the interrupted voice may still appear illusorily continuous. Previous research found that continuity illusions of simple interrupted sounds, such as tones, are accompanied by weaker activity in the primary auditory cortex (PAC) during the interruption than veridical discontinuity percepts of these sounds. Here, we studied whether continuity illusions of more natural and more complex sounds also emerge from this mechanism. We used psychophysics and functional magnetic resonance imaging in humans to measure simultaneously continuity ratings and blood oxygenation level-dependent activity to vowels that were partially replaced by masking noise. Consistent with previous results on tone continuity illusions, we found listeners' reports of more salient vowel continuity illusions associated with weaker activity in auditory cortex (compared with reports of veridical discontinuity percepts of physically identical stimuli). In contrast to the reduced activity to tone continuity illusions in PAC, this reduction was localized in the right anterolateral Heschl's gyrus, a region that corresponds more to the non-PAC. Our findings suggest that the ability to hear differently complex sounds as stable during other louder sounds may be attributable to a common suppressive mechanism that operates at different levels of sound representation in auditory cortex.

show abstract

“…Right-lateralized activations of this region (and/or others in its vicinity) have been reported in healthy individuals during the discrimination of environmental sounds, musical features and sounds of musical instruments, and voices using hemodynamic (Hugdahl et al, 1999;Belin et al, 2000Belin et al, , 2004Bergerbest et al, 2004;Zatorre et al, 2004) and electromagnetic techniques (Tervaniemi et al, 2000;Tervaniemi and Hugdahl, 2003). Other studies suggest that auditory object processing involves a more bilateral, distributed network of brain regions (Maeder et al, 2001;Lewis et al, 2004Lewis et al, , 2005Lattner et al, 2005). However, even when bilateral activity is observed in these studies, the possibility that effects occur first within right hemisphere regions cannot be ruled out on account of the poor temporal resolution of the hemodynamic response.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 89%

Rapid Brain Discrimination of Sounds of Objects

Murray¹,

Camen²,

Andino³

et al. 2006

J. Neurosci.

168

155

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Electrical neuroimaging in humans identified the speed and spatiotemporal brain mechanism whereby sounds of living and man-made objects are discriminated. Subjects performed an "oddball" target detection task, selectively responding to sounds of either living or man-made objects on alternating blocks, which were controlled for in their spectrogram and harmonics-to-noise ratios between categories. Analyses were conducted on 64-channel auditory evoked potentials (AEPs) from nontarget trials. Comparing responses to sounds of living versus man-made objects, these analyses tested for modulations in local AEP waveforms, global response strength, and the topography of the electric field at the scalp. In addition, the local autoregressive average distributed linear inverse solution was applied to periods of observed modulations. Just 70 ms after stimulus onset, a common network of brain regions within the auditory "what" processing stream responded more strongly to sounds of man-made versus living objects, with differential activity within the right temporal and left inferior frontal cortices. Over the 155-257 ms period, the duration of activity of a brain network, including bilateral temporal and premotor cortices, differed between categories of sounds. Responses to sounds of living objects peaked ϳ12 ms later and the activity of the brain network active over this period was prolonged relative to that in response to sounds of man-made objects. The earliest task-related effects were observed at ϳ100 ms poststimulus onset, placing an upper limit on the speed of cortical auditory object discrimination. These results provide critical temporal constraints on human auditory object recognition and semantic discrimination processes.

show abstract

Voice perception: Sex, pitch, and the right hemisphere

Cited by 155 publications

References 43 publications

Hearing an Illusory Vowel in Noise: Suppression of Auditory Cortical Activity

Hearing an Illusory Vowel in Noise: Suppression of Auditory Cortical Activity

Tracking Vocal Pitch through Noise: Neural Correlates in Nonprimary Auditory Cortex

Rapid Brain Discrimination of Sounds of Objects

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About