| Summary: | The auditory system typically processes information from concurrently active sound sources (e.g., two voices speaking at once), in the presence of multiple delayed, attenuated and distorted sound-wave reflections (reverberation). Brainstem circuits help segregate these complex acoustic mixtures into auditory objects. Psychophysical studies demonstrate a strong interaction between reverberation and fundamental-frequency (F0) modulation, leading to impaired segregation of competing vowels when segregation is on the basis of F0 differences. Neurophysiological studies of complex-sound segregation have concentrated on sounds with steady F0s, in anechoic environments. However, F0 modulation and reverberation are quasi-ubiquitous.We examine the ability of 129 single units in the ventral cochlear nucleus of the anesthetized guinea pig to segregate the concurrent synthetic vowel sounds /a/ and /i/, based on temporal discharge patterns under closed-field conditions. We address the effects of added real-room reverberation, F0 modulation, and the interaction of these two factors, on brainstem neural segregation of voiced speech sounds. A firing-rate representation of single-vowels’ spectral envelopes is robust to the combination of F0 modulation and reverberation: local firing-rate maxima and minima across the tonotopic array code vowel-formant structure. However, single-vowel F0-related periodicity information in shuffled inter-spike interval distributions is significantly degraded in the combined presence of reverberation and F0 modulation. Hence, segregation of double-vowels’ spectral energy into two streams (corresponding to the two vowels), on the basis of temporal discharge patterns, is impaired by reverberation; specifically when F0 is modulated. All unit types (primary-like, chopper, onset) are similarly affected. These results offer neurophysiological insights to perceptual organization of complex acoustic scenes under realistically challenging listening conditions.
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