BRAIN-STEM FREQUENCY-FOLLOWING RESPONSE TO DICHOTIC VOWELS DURING ATTENTION

FREQUENCY-FOLLOWING responses (FFRs) were elicited by English long vow els (female /a/ and male /e/) in a dichotic listening task. Stimuli we re simultaneous and of equal duration, but differing spectra permitted unique identification of vowel components in the compound FFR. Horizo ntal and vertical montage FFRs were recorded with putative origins in the acoustic nerve and central brain stem, respectively. FFRs obtained during attention to each vowel showed significant effects for the voi ce fundamental frequency, f(0), which is perceptually salient and conv eys paralinguistic information such as the sex of the speaker. Amplitu des of f(0) were larger when vowels were attended than when ignored. T hese findings provide evidence of short-latency attention effects in h umans and suggest that linguistic attention may initially filter input s based on salient paralinguistic cues. (C) 1998 Rapid Science Ltd.