title: Is desynchrony tolerance adaptable in the perceptual organization of speech?
abstract: Speech signal components that are desynchronized from the veridical temporal pattern lose intelligibility. In contrast, audiovisual presentations with large desynchrony in visible and audible speech streams are perceived without loss of integration. Under such conditions, the limit of desynchrony that permits audiovisual integration is also adaptable. A new project directly investigated the potential for adaptation to consistent desynchrony with unimodal auditory sine-wave speech. Listeners transcribed sentences that are highly intelligible, with veridical temporal properties. Desynchronized variants were created by leading or lagging the tone analog of the second formant relative to the rest of the tones composing the sentences, in 50-msec steps, ranging from 250-msec lead to 250-msec lag. In blocked trials, listeners only tolerated desynchronies <50 msec, and exhibited no gain in intelligibility to consistent desynchrony. Unimodal auditory and bimodal audiovisual forms of perceptual integration evidently exhibit different temporal characteristics, an indication of distinct perceptual functions.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Barnard College, Columbia University, 3009 Broadway, New York, NY 10027-6598, USA. remez@columbia.edu
authors.forename: Robert E
authors.initials: RE
authors.lastname: Remez
authors.forename: Daria F
authors.initials: DF
authors.lastname: Ferro
authors.forename: Kathryn R
authors.initials: KR
authors.lastname: Dubowski
authors.forename: Judith
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Meer
authors.forename: Robin S
authors.initials: RS
authors.lastname: Broder
authors.forename: Morgana L
authors.initials: ML
authors.lastname: Davids
mesh_terms: D006801:Humans; D010469:Perceptual Distortion; D010700:Phonetics; D010865:Pilot Projects; D012660:Semantics; D013018:Sound Spectrography; D013065:Speech Intelligibility; D013067:Speech Perception; D013998:Time Perception