Temporal window of integration estimated by omission in bone-conducted ultrasound

Abstract Bone-conducted ultrasound (BCU) can be heard for both normal-hearing and some profoundly deaf individuals. Moreover, amplitude-modulated BCU can transmit the speech signal. These characteristics of BCU provide the possibility of the developing a bone-conducted ultrasonic hearing aid. Previous studies on the perception mechanism of speech-modulated BCU have pointed to the importance of temporal rather than frequency information. In order to elucidate the perception of speech-modulated BCU, further investigation is need concerning the processing of temporal information. The temporal processing of air-conducted audible sounds (ACASs) involves the integration of closely presented sounds into a single information unit. The long-temporal window of integration was estimated approximately 150–200 ms, which contribute to the discrimination of speech sound. The present study investigated the long-temporal integration system for BCU evaluated by stimulus omission using magnetoencephalography. Eight participants with normal hearing took part in this study. Ultrasonic tone burst with the duration of 50 ms and frequency of 30 kHz was used as the standard stimulus and presented with steady onset-to-onset times or stimulus-onset asynchronies (SOAs). In each sequence, the duration of the SOAs were set to 100, 125, 150, 175, 200, or 350 ms. For deviant, tones were randomly omitted from the stimulus train. Definite mismatch fields were elicited by sound omission in the stimulus train with an SOA of 100–150 ms, but weren’t with an SOA of 200 and 350 ms for all participants. We found that stimulus train for BCUs can be integrated within a temporal window of integration with an SOA of 100–150 ms, but are regarded as a separate event when the SOA is 200 or 350 ms in duration. Therefore, we demonstrated that the long-temporal window of integration for BCUs estimated by omission was 150–200 ms, which was similar to that for ACAS (Yabe et al. NeuroReport 8 (1997) 1971–1974 and Psychophysiology. 35 (1998) 615–619). These findings contribute to the elucidation and improvement of the perception of speech-modulated BCU.