Rate-place coding of formants saturates at high levels while intelligibility persists.

Evidence

At conversational speech levels, these profiles encode the formant frequencies. However, in background noise or as sound level increases the profiles tend to saturate, though intelligibility does not decrease until high SPLs are reached (Studebaker et al. 1999 ). — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 5489

Categorization

• QUESTION: If rate profiles saturate but intelligibility survives, something other than rate-place coding must carry the speech — a nice hook into temporal coding theories.