Nonlinear Cochlear Signal Processing and Phoneme Perception

The most important communication signal is human speech. It is helpful to think of speech communication in terms of Claude Shannon’s information theory channel model. When thus viewed, it immediately becomes clear that the most complex part of speech communication channel is in auditory system (the receiver). In my opinion, even after years of work, relatively little is know about how the human auditory system decodes speech. Given cochlear damaged, speech scores are greatly reduced, even with tiny amounts of noise. The exact reasons for this SNR-loss presently remain unclear, but I speculate that the source of this must be cochlear outer hair cell temporal processing, not central processing. Specifically, “temporal edge enhancement” of the speech signal and forward masking could easily be modified in such ears, leading to SNR-Loss. What ever the reason, SNR-Loss is the key problem that needs to be fully researched.