Factors in the discrimination of tonal patterns. III. Frequency discrimination with components of well-learned patterns

The proportion-of-the-total-duration rule (Kidd & Watson, 1992) states that the detectability of a change in a component of a tonal sequence can be predicted by the proportional duration of the changed component relative to the length of the sequence as a whole. A similar viewpoint relies on temporal distinctivenessto account for primacy, recency, and other serial position effects in memory (Murdock, 1960;Neath, 1993aNeath, , 1993b. Such distinctiveness models predict that an item will be remembered if it is more distinctive along some dimension relative to possible competitors. Three experiments explored the relation between distinctiveness and proportional duration by examining the effects of the proportion of the total duration of a tone in a sequence, serial position, and interstimulus interval (ISI) on the detection of a change in one component of a tonal sequence. Experiment 1 replicated the basic effect with relatively untrained subjects and a fixed frequency difference. Experiment 2 showed that distinctiveness holds for tonal sequences and a same/different task. Experiment 3 combined the two to show that proportional duration, ISI, and position of the changed tone all contribute to discrimination performance. The present research combines theories that have been proposed in the psychophysics and memory fields and suggests that a comprehensive principle based on relative distinctiveness may be able to account for both perceptual and memory effects.

Section: The Proportion-of-the-total-duration Rulesupporting

confidence: 61%

Section: The Proportion-of-the-total-duration Rulementioning

confidence: 99%

Distinctiveness and serial position effects in tonal sequences

Surprenant

2001

“…Watson and his colleagues (Spiegel & Watson, 1981;Watson & Kelly, 1981;Watson, Kelly, & Wroton, 1976;Watson, Wroton, Kelly, & Benbassat, 1975) investigated listeners' discrimination of complex word-length patterns consisting of ten 40-msec tonal components. Not surprisingly, performance in most conditions improved substantially with practice.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Trading relations in speech and nonspeech

Parker

Diehl

Kluender

1986

Two acoustic variables that correlate with the distinction between intervocalic [b] and [p] are closure duration and presence or absence of low-frequency glottal pulsing during the closure interval. These variables may be considered to exhibit a trading relation (Repp, 1982), to the extent that a longer closure is required to perceive the consonant as voiceless when glottal pulsing is present than when it is not. Such trading relations have been interpreted as reflecting a special speech mode of perception. In the present experiments, we demonstrated a trading relation between closure duration and closure pulsing for a set of [abaJ-[apa] stimuli. Next we showed that a similar effect could be obtained with square-wave analogue stimuli that mimicked the segment durations and peak amplitudes of the speech stimuli but that were not phonetically categorizable. This nonspeech trading relation depended on the degree of spectral continuity between the low-frequency pulsing and the adjacent portions of the square wave. The implications of these results for the speech mode hypothesis are discussed.

“…On the other hand, the number of publications devoted specifically to the influence of practice on perceptual auditory performance has remained surprisingly small in comparison with the large number of questions that are still unanswered in this area. Basically, leaving aside studies devoted to auditory learning in speech perception (e.g., Bradlow, Pisoni, AkahaneYamada, & Tohkura, 1997), only a few studies have been devoted specifically to perceptual auditory learning for detection (Gundy, 1961;Zwislocki, Maire, Feldman, & Rubin, 1958) and discrimination in frequency (Campbell & Small, 1963;Demany, 1985;Wyatt, 1945) or duration (Wright, Buonomano, Mahncke, & Merzenich, 1997) of pure tones presented either in isolation or as part of complex temporal sequences (Leek & Watson, 1984;Spiegel & Watson, 1981;Watson, Kelly, & Wroton 1976; for a reThe study described in this article received the approval of the ethics committee (CCPPRB/61-99). The subjects' written informed consent was obtained.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Transfer of learning across durations and ears in auditory frequency discrimination

Delhommeau

Micheyl

Jouvent

et al. 2002

Frequency-discriminationthresholds (FDTs) for 1-kHz tone pips with durations of 40, 100, and 200 msec were measured in the left and right ears of 10 normal-hearing listeners,before and after six 2-h frequencydiscrimination training sessions involving, exclusively, the 200-msec duration and the right ear. In the trained ear, highly significant improvements in FDTs were observed at all durations. Further inspection of the data suggested complete generalizationbetween 200 and 100 msec, but not at 40 msec. Posttraining FDTs were not found to differ between the two ears for the two untrained durations, but proved significantly smaller in the right (trained) than in the left (untrained) ear at the trained (200-msec) duration only. A control experiment involving 10 additional subjects allowed us to establish the absence of intrinsic differences in pretraining FDTs between the right and left ears. Overall, these findings indicate that frequency-discriminationlearning generalizeswidely across stimulus durations and across ears, but that part of the improvement is specific to the range of durations and to the ear used in training.