Neuronal oscillations and speech perception: critical-band temporal envelopes are the essence

A recent opinion article (Neural oscillations in speech: do not be enslaved by the envelope. Obleser et al., 2012) questions the validity of a class of speech perception models inspired by the possible role of neuronal oscillations in decoding speech (e.g., Ghitza, 2011; Giraud and Poeppel, 2012). The authors criticize, in particular, what they see as an over-emphasis of the role of temporal speech envelope information, and an over-emphasis of entrainment to the input rhythm while neglecting the role of top-down processes in modulating the entrainment of neuronal oscillations. Here we respond to these arguments, referring to the phenomenological model of Ghitza (2011), taken as a representative of the criticized approach.