Study of a Neural Model Based on Sound Category Learning

Speech perception is an important part of the perception system.The category learning during infancy leads to the phenomena such as categorical perception and the perceptual magnet effect,which conflicts with the classical formulation of a self-organizing feature map.It proposes a model to explain this phenomenon and the simulation of model proves the feasibility and correctness of this model.The model further predicts that the magnet effect arises because prototypical vowels have smaller auditory cortical representations than non-prototypical vowels,which was supported by a functional magnetic resonance imaging(fMRI) experiment.