SPEECH SOUND REPRESENTATION, PERCEPTION, AND PLASTICITY - A NEUROPHYSIOLOGIC PERSPECTIVE

Historically, auditory research has focused predominately upon how rel atively simple acoustic signals are represented in the neuronal respon ses of the auditory periphery. However, in order to understand the neu rophysiology underlying speech perception, the ultimate objective is t o discover how speech sounds are represented in the central auditory s ystem and to relate that representation to the perception of speech as a meaningful acoustic signal, This paper reviews three areas that per tain to the central auditory representation of speech: ( I) the differ ences in neural representation of speech sounds at different levels of the auditory system; (2) the relation between the representation of s ound in the auditory pathway and the perception/misperception of speec h, and (3) the training-related plasticity of speech sound neural repr esentation and speech perception.