ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the anatomical and physiological basis of speech perception. It reviews the anatomy and physiological data in response to simple stimuli. The chapter discusses the representation of complex sounds and speech signals in the lower levels of the hearing system follows. The exact physiological constraints imposed on human listeners cannot be predicted from animal data, but human psychophysical data may fill this gap where a correspondence of animal behavioral and physiological constraints is established. The signal representation transmitted in the auditory nerve is limited in several aspects: the range of frequencies that can be perceived is determined by the anatomy and physiology of the cochlea. Speech sounds exhibit modulation of the signal amplitude at many levels. Neurons with characteristic frequencies away from carrier frequencies of simple stimuli will not saturate and still code amplitude modulation well. Each auditory nerve fiber tends to fire in synchrony with the strongest harmonic component within its receptive field.
