Perception of Long-Period Complex Sounds.

摘要

Working with recycled sequences of ten 40 ms items the investigators studied the discrimination of minimal changes for: sinusoids, vowels, and frozen noise segments. Listeners made ABX judgments for sequences differing only in the ordering of two contiguous items. In contrast with results previously obtained for ten-item sequences presented in transient one-shot bursts, recycled stimuli were readily discriminated by untrained listeners. The relative difficulty of discriminating tonal patterns (measured by response time) was an inverse function of: a) the frequency separation between the permuted tones; and b) the frequency separation between the tones immediately preceding and following the permuted pair. For the vowel sequences, listeners' trial by trial repor indicate that discrimination of order was mediated by verbal organization involving introduction of illusory consonants and distortion of the vowels. Discrimination of order within sequences of frozen noise was more difficult than found with tone or vowel sequence but all listeners performed at levels well above chance. Additional work with recycled frozen noise is proceeding satisfactorily which deals with the ability to remember and recognize segments up to 1 s in duration, and the relative salience of various spectral regions in this process. Keywords: Auditory perception; Complex sounds; Pitch. (jhd)