Surveying auditory space using vowel formant data
Matthew J. Makashay, Keith Johnson · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1998
Recent research has suggested that vowel category learning and the perceptual magnet effect are the natural consequences of auditory neural map formation [F. H. Guenther and M. N. Gjaja, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 100, 1111–1121 (1996)]. As these effects are language specific, the organization of the perceptual map crucially is dependent on the input received during learning. Guenther and Gjaja implemented a working model of a self-organizing neural map to show that, given input from Gaussian distributions around vowel category centers, unsupervised training leads to a warping of the perceptual space toward the category centers. This work replicates Guenther and Gjaja’s results and provides a more realistic test of the model by using real vowel formant data instead of idealized distributions. Single and multiple male talker vowel data were used to train auditory neural maps. Single-talker simulations resulted in map organization similar to Guenther and Gjaja’s results. However, no clear vowel category clusters emerged in the multiple-talker simulations. [Work supported by NSF Graduate Fellowship and NIH FIRST Award R29-DC01645-06.]