Cognitive restoration of reversed speech

Abstract

Speech is the most complex auditory signal and requires the most processing. The human brain devotes large cortical areas to deciphering the information it contains, as well as parsing speech sounds produced simultaneously by several speakers. The brain can also invoke corrective measures to restore distortions in speech; for example, if a brief speech sound is replaced by an interfering sound that masks it, such as a cough, the listener perceives the missing speech as if the brain interpolates through the absent segment. We have studied the intelligibility of speech, and find it is resistant to time reversal of local segments of a spoken sentence, which has been described as "the most drastic form of time scale distortion".

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