Rate-place profiles of auditory nerve fibers degrade in noise though speech intelligibility persists

Evidence

The responses of AN models to the vowel/æ/(in “had”) are illustrated in Fig. 2 , with the vowel waveform (Fig. 2a ) and spectrum (Fig. 2b ). Discharge rate vs. BF is shown for healthy (Fig. 2c ) and impaired (Fig. 2e ) model populations. 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…, 5488