Temporal responses of primarylike anteroventral cochlear nucleus units to the steady-state vowel /i/.

It has previously been shown that a population of units classified as "primarylike" and located in the ventral cochlear nucleus of the anesthetized guinea pig was unable to signal the position of the higher formant-related peaks (greater than 1.5 kHz) of steady-state vowels in terms of a temporal-place representation [Palmer et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 79, 100-113 (1986)]. In this paper, it is demonstrated that units characterized by a prepotential in their spike waveform and a primarylike post-stimulus time histogram shape can encode the relative position of the formant peaks present in the spectra of steady-state vowels in terms of a temporal-place code. The possible reasons for the differences in the present results and the previous report are discussed.