TY - JOUR AU - Miettinen, Ismo AU - Tiitinen, Hannu AU - Alku, Paavo AU - May, Patrick JC PY - 2010 DA - 2010/02/22 TI - Sensitivity of the human auditory cortex to acoustic degradation of speech and non-speech sounds JO - BMC Neuroscience SP - 24 VL - 11 IS - 1 AB - Recent studies have shown that the human right-hemispheric auditory cortex is particularly sensitive to reduction in sound quality, with an increase in distortion resulting in an amplification of the auditory N1m response measured in the magnetoencephalography (MEG). Here, we examined whether this sensitivity is specific to the processing of acoustic properties of speech or whether it can be observed also in the processing of sounds with a simple spectral structure. We degraded speech stimuli (vowel /a/), complex non-speech stimuli (a composite of five sinusoidals), and sinusoidal tones by decreasing the amplitude resolution of the signal waveform. The amplitude resolution was impoverished by reducing the number of bits to represent the signal samples. Auditory evoked magnetic fields (AEFs) were measured in the left and right hemisphere of sixteen healthy subjects. SN - 1471-2202 UR - https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2202-11-24 DO - 10.1186/1471-2202-11-24 ID - Miettinen2010 ER -