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Poster Session A: Tuesday, August 12, 1:30 – 4:30 pm, de Brug & E‑Hall

Vowel Duration Is Encoded Relative to the Contextual Speech Rate Throughout Cortical Auditory Processing

Mara Wolter¹, Andrey Zyryanov¹, Yulia Oganian¹; ¹Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen

Presenter: Mara Wolter

Across languages, listeners perceive durational features in speech relative to the syllable rate of the surrounding context. Despite the importance of this mechanism, it remains unclear how the cortex normalizes sound durations during speech perception. Here we used MEG to investigate rate normalization for vowel duration in German, where the contextual speech rate can decisively shift listeners’ word perception (e.g., satt – ˈzat – “full” vs. Saat – ˈzaːt – “seed”). We found that rate influences evoked activity before, during and after the target vowel, across auditory, motor and inferior frontal regions. Vowel duration effects from ~130 ms post vowel offset always co-occurred with rate effects. This spatiotemporal overlap suggests that vowel duration is encoded relative to contextual speech rate throughout cortical processing, and that contextual rate normalization is an integral part of duration encoding.

Topic Area: Language & Communication

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