Quantifying envelope and fine-structure coding in auditory nerve responses to chimaeric speech.

Any sound can be separated mathematically into a slowly varying envelope and rapidly varying fine-structure component. This property has motivated numerous perceptual studies to understand the relative importance of each component for speech and music perception. Specialized acoustic stimuli, such as auditory chimaeras with the envelope of one sound and fine structure of another have been used to separate the perceptual roles for envelope and fine structure. Cochlear narrowband filtering limits the ability to isolate fine structure from envelope; however, envelope recovery from fine structure has been difficult to evaluate physiologically. To evaluate envelope recovery at the output of the cochlea, neural cross-correlation coefficients were developed that quantify the similarity between two sets of spike-train responses. Shuffled auto- and cross-correlogram analyses were used to compute separate correlations for responses to envelope and fine structure based on both model and recorded spike trains from auditory nerve fibers. Previous correlogram analyses were extended to isolate envelope coding more effectively in auditory nerve fibers with low center frequencies, which are particularly important for speech coding. Recovered speech envelopes were present in both model and recorded responses to one- and 16-band speech fine-structure chimaeras and were significantly greater for the one-band case, consistent with perceptual studies. Model predictions suggest that cochlear recovered envelopes are reduced following sensorineural hearing loss due to broadened tuning associated with outer-hair cell dysfunction. In addition to the within-fiber cross-stimulus cases considered here, these neural cross-correlation coefficients can also be used to evaluate spatiotemporal coding by applying them to cross-fiber within-stimulus conditions. Thus, these neural metrics can be used to quantitatively evaluate a wide range of perceptually significant temporal coding issues relevant to normal and impaired hearing.