Neuronal oscillations and speech perception: critical-band temporal envelopes are the essence

Front Hum Neurosci. 2013 Jan 4:6:340. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2012.00340. eCollection 2012.

Abstract

A RECENT OPINION ARTICLE (NEURAL OSCILLATIONS IN SPEECH: do not be enslaved by the envelope. Obleser et al., 2012) questions the validity of a class of speech perception models inspired by the possible role of neuronal oscillations in decoding speech (e.g., Ghitza, 2011; Giraud and Poeppel, 2012). The authors criticize, in particular, what they see as an over-emphasis of the role of temporal speech envelope information, and an over-emphasis of entrainment to the input rhythm while neglecting the role of top-down processes in modulating the entrainment of neuronal oscillations. Here we respond to these arguments, referring to the phenomenological model of Ghitza (2011), taken as a representative of the criticized approach.

Keywords: cascaded neuronal oscillations; critical-band envelopes; hierarchical window structure; intelligibility; syllabic parsing.