Correlation of acoustic features and electrophysiological outcomes of stimuli at the level of auditory brainstem

It is widely acknowledged that the human auditory system is organized tonotopically and people generally listen to sounds as a function of frequency distribution through the auditory system. However, it is still unclear how acoustic features of speech sounds are indicated to the human brain in terms of speech perception. Thus, the purpose of this study is to investigate whether two sounds with similar high-frequency characteristics in the acoustic analysis show similar results at the level of auditory brainstem. Thirty three young adults with normal hearing participated in the study. As stimuli, two Korean monosyllables (i.e., /ja/ and /cha/) and four frequencies of toneburst (i.e., 500, 1000, 2000, and 4000 Hz) were used to elicit the auditory brainstem response (ABR). Measures of monosyllable and toneburst were highly replicable and the wave V of waveform was detectable in all subjects. In the results of Pearson correlation analysis, the /ja/ syllable had a high correlation with 4000 Hz of toneburst which means that its acoustic characteristics (i.e., 3671~5384 Hz) showed the same results in the brainstem. However, the /cha/ syllable had a high correlation with 1000 and 2000 Hz of toneburst although it has acoustical distribution of 3362~5412 Hz. We concluded that there was disagreement between acoustic features and physiology outcomes at the auditory brainstem level. This finding suggests that an acoustical-perceptual mapping study is needed to scrutinize human speech perception.