We are glad to announce that our paper (Mathias Scharinger, Samantha Poe, & William Idsardi) on cortical representations of Turkish vowels is in press in Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. In this paper, we extend previous methods of obtaining centers of cortical activity evoked by vowel exemplars (e.g. Obleser et al., 2003, on German) and provide an N1m ECD (Equivalent Current Dipole) map of the entire vowel space of Turkish. Intriguingly, ECD locations mapped nearly perfect to locations in F2/F1 space, although our model comparison suggested that inclusion of discrete feature based predictors for both locations as well as collocations of vowels in auditory cortex improves the model fits substantially. We discuss the findings on the background of neural coding schemes for speech-related auditory categories.
UPDATE: Paper is available here.
References
- Scharinger M, Idsardi WJ, Poe S. A comprehensive three-dimensional cortical map of vowel space. J Cogn Neurosci. 2011 Dec;23(12):3972–82. PMID: 21568638. [Open with Read]