Simulating the phonological auditory cortex from vowel representation spaces to categories

Vowels are important clues supporting speech perception. Nevertheless in Computational Perception the definition of vowels is a very complex and elusive issue. The purpose of the present paper is to give a possible definition under the perceptual point of view. A vowel could be defined as an assignment of an acoustic phonetic pattern to a specific categorical representation space. This assignment would be competitively instantiated in the cortical structures, depending on the specific phonological framework of the listener's language. An experimental framework is designed to test this definition on a Neuromorphic Speech Processing Architecture. Results from experiments to test reference patterns in Spanish, and possible extension to other languages with a larger repertoire of categories are presented and discussed. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.