Middle ear stapedius muscle acoustic reflex and laryngeal amplitude response
Abstract
This study describes the ascending auditory pathway of the middle ear stapedius muscle acoustic reflex. The purpose is to localize the reflex's role in transmitting complex speech sound, specifically, resonant and prosodic elements-stress and syllables-produced in the laryngeal-pharyngeal region of the vocal tract. The corresponding acoustic components are amplitude and intensity. The processing locale of these speech elements apparently differs from that of segment processing which occurs in the peripheral auditory system. Acoustic and psychoacoustical data suggests a system which, in addition to the peripheral auditory system, operates in sound identification, moreover, this system creates some form of representation of the laryngeal and prosodic elements in the human speech signal. These observations are summarized here in reference to selection for a laryngeal and prosodic inventory in natural language. Stevens asks how constraints imposed by the auditory system shape the inventory of sounds used in language. A second question, beyond this paper's scope, is how auditory processing imposes a classificatory structure on the phonetic sounds of language. The present, informal study contributes to deriving a system of non-peripheral bioacoustic constraints on the auditory representation of language
Copyright on articles is held by the author(s). The corresponding author has the right to grant on behalf of all authors and does grant on behalf of all authors, a worldwide exclusive licence (or non-exclusive license for government employees) to the Publishers and its licensees in perpetuity, in all forms, formats and media (whether known now or created in the future)
i) to publish, reproduce, distribute, display and store the Contribution;
ii) to translate the Contribution into other languages, create adaptations, reprints, include within collections and create summaries, extracts and/or, abstracts of the Contribution;
iii) to exploit all subsidiary rights in the Contribution,
iv) to provide the inclusion of electronic links from the Contribution to third party material where-ever it may be located;
v) to licence any third party to do any or all of the above.
