To determine if listeners can accurately identify various environmental sounds, a total of 40 sounds, including animal, inanimate, musical, and human sounds, were recorded, randomly arranged on a master tape, and presented to 30 judges for identification. Analysis indicated that, in general, listeners can accurately identify environmental sounds. However, their accuracy was not equal for all four classes of sounds investigated: human sounds yielded the highest accuracy, followed by musical and inanimate sounds, and animal sounds were least accurately identified. Implications and suggestions for research are discussed.

Subjects exhibiting spontaneous acoustic emissions (SAEs) were presented with wideband noise in the ear contralateral to that in which their SAE was being recorded. The SAE magnitudes were monitored while the noise was incremented in 5-dB steps. Some SAE components were mar-

The purpose of this investigation was to determine if listeners can accurately identify various environmental sounds. A total of 40 sounds were recorded: (a) 20 animal sounds from four cows, cats, dogs, pigs, and sheep; (b) 12 inanimate sounds from four typewriters, car horns, and telephones; (c) four musical sounds from a flute, piano, guitar, and drum; and (d) four human sounds (/pʌ) from two female and two male speakers. A master tape containing the randomly arranged recordings was prepared and presented to 30 judges who were asked to identify the source of each sound and the confidence of their judgments on a seven-point rating scale. Results indicate that listeners can accurately identify environmental sounds. However, their accuracy was not equal within each sound class as well as between all four classes of sounds investigated: human sounds yielded the highest accuracy, followed by musical and inanimate sounds, and animal sounds were least accurately identified. Moreover, listeners' judgmental confidence was similar to that of their accuracy. Implications of these findings and suggestions for future research are discussed.

To determine if listeners can accurately distinguish between real and human-imitated animal sounds, a total of 165 recorded sounds (55 real and 110 human-imitated) of cats, cows, dogs, pigs, and sheep were randomly arranged on a master tape and presented to 30 listeners for discriminative judgments. Results indicate that, in general, listeners can accurately discriminate real from human-imitated animal sounds. Suggestions for future research are discussed.

To determine whether listeners can accurately identify human-imitated animal sounds, 20 speakers (10 females and 10 males) recorded their imitations of cows, cats, dogs, pigs, and sheep. These recordings were randomly arranged on a master tape and presented to 30 judges for identification. Analysis indicates that listeners can accurately identify various human-imitated animal sounds. Implications and suggestions for future research are discussed.