Synchrony capture near formants suppresses F0 phase locking while fibers between formants encode F0

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 ). … Dominant components for the healthy AN model (Fig. 2d ) show synchrony capture, or dominance of the temporal responses by a single harmonic near the formant peak. The synchrony capture extends across a span of fibres with BFs near each formant frequency (red arrows). The dominance of these responses by a harmonic near the formants (orange arrows) results in absence of synchrony to F0 (black arrow) for BFs near formants. In contrast, fibres tuned between the formants are not dominated by a single harmonic. Because these fibres respond to multiple harmonics near their BFs (green arrow), their responses synchronize to the “beats” at F0 (black arrow). — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 5488

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘synchrony capture’ — dominance of a fiber’s temporal response by a single harmonic near the formant peak.