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Updated: Apr 6, 2026

Morphological and Functional Evaluation of Ribbon Synapses at Specific Frequency Regions of the Mouse Cochlea
Published on: May 10, 2019
The phonological function of vowels is maintained at fundamental frequencies up to 880 Hz
Daniel Friedrichs1, Dieter Maurer2, Volker Dellwo3
1Phonetics Laboratory, Department of Comparative Linguistics, University of Zurich, Plattenstr. 54, CH-8032 Zurich, Switzerland daniel.friedrichs@uzh.ch.
Abstract:
In a between-subject perception task, listeners either identified full words or vowels isolated from these words at F0s between 220 and 880 Hz. They received two written words as response options (minimal pair with the stimulus vowel in contrastive position). Listeners' sensitivity (A') was extremely high in both conditions at all F0s, showing that the phonological function of vowels can also be maintained at high F0s. This indicates that vowel sounds may carry strong acoustic cues departing from common formant frequencies at high F0s and that listeners do not rely on consonantal context phenomena for their identification performance.
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