Sensorineural Processes

Understanding fundamental processes of audition is a requirement for a realistic understanding of successive processing of speech and other complex sounds. In many cases, we can study important psychoacoustic processes in laboratory tasks with adult listeners. In some cases when it is necessary to avoid confounding effects of experience, we have used nonhuman animals as model mammalian systems. The extraordinary strength of hearing research at the University of Wisconsin encourages especially rich and informative interactions concerning fundamental issues in audition. Most recently, we have demonstrated how fundamental aspects of cochlear transduction predict a remarkable proportion of sentence intelligibility while also helping to define especially useful phonological constructs such as sonority.

Selected sensorineural publications:

Stilp, C.E., Kiefte, M., Alexander, J.M., & Kluender, K.R. (in press). “Cochlea-scaled spectral entropy predicts rate-invariant intelligibility of temporally distorted sentences.” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

Alexander, J. M., and Kluender, K. R. (in press).  “Temporal properties of perceptual calibration to local and broad spectral characteristics of a listening context,” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

Stilp, C.E., & Kluender, K.R. (2010). “Cochlea-scaled spectral entropy, not consonants, vowels, or time, best predicts speech intelligibility.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, 107(27), 12387-12392. PDF

Coady, J.A., & Kluender, K.R., & Rhode, W.S. (2003). "Effects of contrast between onsets of speech and other complex spectra." Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 114(4), 2225-2235. PDF

Recio, A., Rhode, W.S., Kiefte, M., & Kluender, K.R. (2002). "Responses to cochlear normalized speech stimuli in the auditory nerve of cat." Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. 111(3), 2213-2218. PDF

Kluender, K.R., Coady, J.A., & Kiefte, M. (2001). "Sensitivity to change in perception of speech." Speech Communication, 41(1), 59-69. PDF

Sensorineural Processes

Perceptual Experience

Speech for Language

Applications