A biocybernetic simulation of speech perception by humans and animals

Important aspects of the voiced/unvoiced categorization of synthetic syllable-initial stop consonants are reproduced by a two stage biocybernetic simulation of the auditory system. This behavior is emergent - it is not explicitly programmed into the model - and no fine timing information is necessary. Unlike real (human and animal) listeners, the computational auditory model can be systematically manipulated and probed to determine the basis of its behavior. This reveals the importance of the region of first formant onset to the perception of voicing for these stimuli. Spectral analysis of this region in the raw stimuli show that processing by the first stage of the model, mimicking the functions of the peripheral auditory system, is not essential to the observed behavior. Thus, in this case at least, the phonetic perception of voicing is directly recoverable from both acoustic and auditory representations of the stimuli