Comparison of the effect of onset asynchrony on auditory grouping in pitch matching and vowel identification.
Previous experiments have shown that when a slightly mistuned harmonic of a complex tone starts more than about 80 msec before the remaining components, it makes a reduced contribution to the pitch of the complex. This contribution decreases to zero by about 300-msec onset asynchrony. In vowel perception, however, analogous experiments have shown that a much shorter asynchrony (around 40 msec) is enough to ensure that a component does not influence a vowel's phonemic category. The three experiments reported here demonstrate that this difference in the utility of onset time as a grouping cue does not arise because of differences in stimulus structure, but rather is due to the perceptual task. They show that the onset asynchrony needed in a pitch-matching experiment to remove the contribution that a mistuned component makes to the pitch of a vowel is the same as that needed to remove the contribution to the pitch of a flat-spectrum complex tone. They further show that a much smaller onset asynchrony is needed to perceptually remove the same harmonic from a vowel for the calculation of vowel quality. The implication of this result for models of auditory grouping is discussed.
Hukin
R W
RW
Laboratory of Experimental Psychology, University of Sussex, Brighton, England.
Darwin
C J
CJ
D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010700:Phonetics; D010897:Pitch Discrimination; D011571:Psychoacoustics; D013018:Sound Spectrography; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013067:Speech Perception