The "proportion-of-the-total-duration rule" for the discrimination of auditory patterns.

A principle of auditory perception that governs the detectability of changes in components in unfamiliar sequences of tones is demonstrated in four experiments. The proportion-of-the-total-duration (PTD) rule can be stated as follows: Each individual component of an unfamiliar sequence of tones is resolved with an accuracy that is a function of its proportion of the total duration of the sequence or "pattern." An adaptive-tracking frequency-discrimination task was used in all experiments. Experiment 1 demonstrated that the PTD rule holds over a wide range of total pattern durations, numbers of components, and component durations. Experiment 2 demonstrated that the PTD rule governs discrimination performance despite variation in the relative durations of context and target tones. Experiment 3, using a variable temporal position for the target, confirmed that the PTD effect does not require that a listener be able to anticipate the temporal location of the target tone. Experiment 4, using two target tones, showed that the PTD rules applies to the proportional duration of individual components within patterns and not to the total proportional duration of nonadjacent components within the pattern. These findings are incompatible with performance limitations based on a fixed-duration short-term memory capacity and with versions of informational limitations in which the amount of information in a pattern varies either with the number of components or with the total pattern duration. The PTD rule appears to reflect the way listeners distribute their attention when presented with unfamiliar complex sounds that have no structural properties (other than proportional duration) that significantly increase the salience of individual components.     

Temporal discrimination for single components of nonspeech auditory patterns

This paper extends previous research on listeners' abilities to discriminate the details of brief tonal components occurring within sequential auditory patterns (Watson et al., 1975, 1976). Specifically, the ability to discriminate increments in the duration delta t of tonal components was examined. Stimuli consisted of sequences of ten sinusoidal tones: a 40-ms test tone to which delta t was added, plus nine context tones with individual durations fixed at 40 ms or varying between 20 and 140 ms. The level of stimulus uncertainty was varied from high (any of 20 test tones occurring in any of nine factorial contexts), through medium (any of 20 test tones occurring in ten contexts), to minimal levels (one test tone occurring in a single context). The ability to discriminate delta t depended strongly on the level of stimulus uncertainty, and on the listener's experience with the tonal context. Asymptotic thresholds under minimal uncertainty approached 4-6 ms, or 15% of the duration of the test tones; under high uncertainty, they approached 40 ms, or 10% of the total duration of the tonal sequence. Initial thresholds exhibited by inexperienced listeners are two-to-four times greater than the asymptotic thresholds achieved after considerable training (20,000-30,000 trials). Isochronous sequences, with context tones of uniform, 40-ms duration, yield lower thresholds than those with components of varying duration. The frequency and temporal position of the test tones had only minor effects on temporal discrimination. It is proposed that a major determinant of the ability to discriminate the duration of components of sequential patterns is the listener's knowledge about "what to listen for and where." Reduced stimulus uncertainty and extensive practice increase the precision of this knowledge, and result in high-resolution discrimination performance. Increased uncertainty, limited practice, or both, would allow only discrimination of gross changes in the temporal or spectral structure of the sequential patterns.     

Perception of temporal patterns defined by tonal sequences

This experiment tested how listeners discriminate between the temporal patterns defined by two sequences of tones. Two arrhythmic sequences of n tones were played successively (n = 8, 12, or 16, tone duration = 35 ms, frequency = 1000 Hz), and the listener reported whether the sequences had the same or different temporal patterns. In the first sequence, the durations of the intertone gaps were chosen at random; in the second sequence, the gaps were either (a) the same as the first sequence or (b) chosen at random. Discrimination performance increased with the variability of the gap sequences and decreased with the size of the correlation between the sequences. A discrimination model based on computation of the sample correlation between the sequences of gaps, but limited by an internal variability of approximately 15 ms, described observer performance in a variety of conditions.     

Developmental patterns of speech production in children

It has been suggested that pauses between words could act as indices of processes such as selection, retrieval or planning that are required before an utterance is articulated. For normal meaningful phrase utterances, there is hardly any information regarding the relationship between articulation and pause duration and their subsequent relation to the final phrase duration. Such associations could provide insights into the mechanisms underlying the planning and execution of a vocal utterance. To execute a fluent vocal utterance, children might adopt different strategies in development. We investigate this hypothesis by examining the roles of articulation time and pause duration in meaningful phrase utterances in 46 children between the ages of 4 and 8 years, learning English as a second language.Our results indicate a significant reduction in phrase, word and interword pause duration with increasing age. A comparison of pause, word and phrase duration for individual subjects belonging to different age groups indicates a changing relationship between pause and word duration for the production of fluent speech. For the youngest children, a strong correlation between pause and word duration indicates local planning at word level for speech production and thus greater dependence of pause on immediate word utterance. In contrast for the oldest children we find a significant drop in correlation between word and pause indicating the emergence of articulation and pause planning as two independent processes directed at producing a fluent utterance. Strong correlations between other temporal parameters indicate a more holistic approach being adopted by the older children for language production.     

Target spectral, dynamic spectral, and duration cues in infant perception of German vowels

Previous studies of vowel perception have shown that adult speakers of American English and of North German identify native vowels by exploiting at least three types of acoustic information contained in consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) syllables: target spectral information reflecting the articulatory target of the vowel, dynamic spectral information reflecting CV- and -VC coarticulation, and duration information. The present study examined the contribution of each of these three types of information to vowel perception in prelingual infants and adults using a discrimination task. Experiment 1 examined German adults' discrimination of four German vowel contrasts (see text), originally produced in /dVt/ syllables, in eight experimental conditions in which the type of vowel information was manipulated. Experiment 2 examined German-learning infants' discrimination of the same vowel contrasts using a comparable procedure. The results show that German adults and German-learning infants appear able to use either dynamic spectral information or target spectral information to discriminate contrasting vowels. With respect to duration information, the removal of this cue selectively affected the discriminability of two of the vowel contrasts for adults. However, for infants, removal of contrastive duration information had a larger effect on the discrimination of all contrasts tested.     

Temporal factors in the discrimination of tonal sequences

Human observers were asked to judge whether or not two sequences of eight or more tones had the same serial pattern of frequencies. The temporal envelopes of the sequences were manipulated by randomly varying the tone durations or intertone gaps. In the correlated condition, the temporal envelopes of the sequences were varied across trials; the two sequences within each trial had the same temporal envelope. In the uncorrelated condition, the temporal envelopes were varied both across and within trials; every sequence had a unique temporal pattern. Performance in the uncorrelated condition decreased with increased variability in the temporal envelope. Performance in the correlated condition was independent of temporal variability, but decreased with increases in the time interval between the onsets of the two sequences. This pattern of results is consistent with an extension of a model of auditory discrimination developed by Durlach and Braida [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 46, 372-383 (1969)], in which two processing modes are postulated: a trace mode and a context mode. When the tonal sequences had unique temporal patterns, context mode processing was dominant; when the sequences had identical temporal patterns, trace mode processing was preferred. The effect of variables such as the number of tones, the tone duration, the time gap between tones, and the time interval between sequences was consistent with the predictions of the discrimination model.     

A New Method for Rotation and Brightness Invariant Pattern Recognition Based on Modified Multiple Circular Harmonic Expansions

A new method for rotation and brightness invariant pattern recognition was proposed by applying multiple circular harmonic expansions to the joint transform correlator. The amplitudes of the multiple orders of circular harmonic expansions made from a detecting image were synthetically modified to respond to the same auto-correlation peaks. These modified circular harmonic expansions were arranged in the input plane as reference patterns together with an arbitrary target pattern, and the correlation signals between them were calculated in the subtracted joint transform correlator. The fraction of the correlation-peak intensities between the target and the references were extracted as a new discrimination parameter. This new parameter performs pattern recognition under rotation and brightness invariance with good discriminability. Its high discriminability has been proved in computer simulations using the face image patterns of many individuals.     

Fractal structure of digital speckle patterns produced by rough surfaces

We report on the fractal analysis of digital speckle patterns experimentally generated using an optical setup to record the light scattered from metallic rough surfaces in the normal direction. Using the differential box counting technique, we have calculated the fractal dimension of digital speckle patterns for six samples with different roughness. Our results show a quadratic dependence between the surface roughness and the fractal dimension of the corresponding digital speckle pattern. As an application a method to determine the surface roughness of metallic surfaces is proposed.     

Word-internal versus word-peripheral consonantal duration patterns in three languages

Segmental duration patterns have long been used to support the proposal that syllables are basic speech planning units, but production experiments almost always confound syllable and word boundaries. The current study tried to remedy this problem by comparing word-internal and word-peripheral consonantal duration patterns. Stress and sequencing were used to vary the nominal location of word-internal boundaries in American English productions of disyllabic nonsense words with medial consonant sequences. The word-internal patterns were compared to those that occurred at the edges of words, where boundary location was held constant and only stress and sequence order were varied. The English patterns were then compared to patterns from Russian and Finnish. All three languages showed similar effects of stress and sequencing on consonantal duration, but an independent effect of syllable position was observed only in English and only at a word boundary. English also showed stronger effects of stress and sequencing across a word boundary than within a word. Finnish showed the opposite pattern, whereas Russian showed little difference between word-internal and word-peripheral patterns. Overall, the results suggest that the suprasegmental units of motor planning are language-specific and that the word may be more a relevant planning unit in English.     

Similarity, uncertainty, and masking in the identification of nonspeech auditory patterns

This study examined whether increasing the similarity between informational maskers and signals would increase the amount of masking obtained in a nonspeech pattern identification task. The signals were contiguous sequences of pure-tone bursts arranged in six narrow-band spectro-temporal patterns. The informational maskers were sequences of multitone bursts played synchronously with the signal tones. The listener's task was to identify the patterns in a 1-interval 6-alternative forced-choice procedure. Three types of multitone maskers were generated according to different randomization rules. For the least signal-like informational masker, the components in each multitone burst were chosen at random within the frequency range of 200-6500 Hz, excluding a "protected region" around the signal frequencies. For the intermediate masker, the frequency components in the first burst were chosen quasirandomly, but the components in successive bursts were constrained to fall in narrow frequency bands around the frequencies of the components in the initial burst. Within the narrow bands the frequencies were randomized. This masker was considered to be more similar to the signal patterns because it consisted of a set of narrow-band sequences any one of which might be mistaken for a signal pattern. The most signal-like masker was similar to the intermediate masker in that it consisted of a set of synchronously played narrow-band sequences, but the variation in frequency within each sequence was sinusoidal, completing roughly one period in a sequence. This masker consisted of discernible patterns but not patterns that were part of the set of signals. In addition, masking produced by Gaussian noise bursts--thought to produce primarily peripherally based "energetic masking"--was measured and compared to the informational masking results. For the three informational maskers, more masking was produced by the maskers comprised of narrow-band sequences than for the masker in which the frequencies were not constrained to narrow bands. Also, the slopes of the performance-level functions for the three informational maskers were much shallower than for the Gaussian noise masker or for no masker. The findings provided qualified support for the hypothesis that increasing the similarity between signals and maskers, or parts of the maskers, causes greater informational masking. However, it is also possible that the greater masking was a consequence of increasing the number of perceptual "streams" that had to be evaluated by the listener.     

Thresholds for discrimination between pure and tempered intervals: the relevance of nearly coinciding harmonics

Thresholds for discrimination between pure and tempered musical intervals consisting of simultaneous complex tones (fundamental frequencies f1 and f2) were investigated. For these tones the main clue for the discrimination of pure intervals (f1:f2 = p:q; p and q small integers) from moderately tempered intervals (f1:f2 approximately p:q) is absence versus presence of beats. The strength of the beats (level difference between envelope maximum and minimum or level-variation depth D) was manipulated by introduction of differences in level (delta L) between the two tones. In each of three experiments the discrimination thresholds (DTs) were determined for 13 intervals with different values for p and/or q. Experiment 1 showed that there is a simple relation between frequency-ratio complexity and discriminability: DTs gradually increased (smaller values of delta L) with increasing p + q. Experiment 2, in which tones with harmonics of equal amplitude were used, indicated that level of the interfering harmonics was not responsible for the relation between DT and p + q. Yet, Experiment 3, in which the spectral content of the tones was varied, clearly showed that for all intervals DT had been determined by the interference between nearly coinciding harmonics. Detailed analysis of the results revealed that the relation between DT and ratio complexity might have been the result of masking.     

Frequency modulation detection: effects of age, psychophysical method, and modulation waveform

As part of an ongoing study of auditory aging, detection of sinusoidal and quasitrapezoidal frequency modulation (FM) was measured with a 5-Hz modulation frequency and 500- and 4000-Hz carriers in two experiments. In Experiment 1, psychometric functions for FM detection were measured with several modulation waveform time patterns in younger adults with normal hearing. Detection of a three-cycle modulated signal improved when its duration was extended by a preceding unmodulated cycle, an effect similar to adding a modulated cycle. In Experiment 2, FM detection was measured for younger and older adults with normal hearing using two psychophysical methods. Similar to frequency discrimination, FM detection was poorer in older than younger subjects and age-related differences were larger at 500 Hz than at 4000 Hz, suggesting that FM detection with low modulation frequencies and frequency discrimination may share common underlying mechanisms. One mechanism is likely related to temporal information coded by neural phase locking which is strong at low frequencies and decreases with increasing frequency, as observed in animals. The frequency-dependent aging effect suggests that this temporal mechanism may be affected by age. The effect of psychophysical method was sizable and frequency dependent, whereas the effect of modulation waveform was minimal.     

Further evidence that fundamental-frequency difference limens measure pitch discrimination

Difference limens for complex tones (DLCs) that differ in F0 are widely regarded as a measure of periodicity-pitch discrimination. However, because F0 changes are inevitably accompanied by changes in the frequencies of the harmonics, DLCs may actually reflect the discriminability of individual components. To test this hypothesis, DLCs were measured for complex tones, the component frequencies of which were shifted coherently upward or downward by ΔF = 0%, 25%, 37.5%, or 50% of the F0, yielding fully harmonic (ΔF = 0%), strongly inharmonic (ΔF = 25%, 37.5%), or odd-harmonic (ΔF = 50%) tones. If DLCs truly reflect periodicity-pitch discriminability, they should be larger (worse) for inharmonic tones than for harmonic and odd harmonic tones because inharmonic tones have a weaker pitch. Consistent with this prediction, the results of two experiments showed a non-monotonic dependence of DLCs on ΔF, with larger DLCs for ΔF's of ± 25% or ± 37.5% than for ΔF's of 0 or ± 50% of F0. These findings are consistent with models of pitch perception that involve harmonic templates or with an autocorrelation-based model provided that more than just the highest peak in the summary autocorrelogram is taken into account.     

Masked detection and discrimination of tone sequences under conditions of monaural and binaural masking release

Experiment 1 examined detection and discrimination of monaural four-tone sequences composed of 400-, 500-, and 625-Hz sinusoids. In the baseline conditions, the masker was monaural composed of 25-Hz-wide bands of random noise centered on 320, 400, 500, 625, and 781 Hz. In the binaural masking release conditions, the noise was presented diotically. In the monaural masking release conditions, the noise was presented to the same ear as the signal, but it was comodulated. Tones had half-amplitude durations of 30, 60, or 150 ms. There was no delay between successive tones, so the rate of frequency change depended on tone duration. Listeners discriminated between sequences composed of 500-400-625-500 Hz and 500-625-400-500 Hz. Discrimination results were poor for rapid sequences in both monaural and binaural masking release conditions relative to baseline conditions. Results from experiment 2 indicated that poor discrimination for rapid sequences could also occur in the baseline conditions, provided that the frequency separation among tonal components was small. Sluggish processing in the present paradigm was not restricted to conditions relying on binaural cues. It is argued that sluggishness may reflect a long temporal window in monaural and binaural masking release conditions or an interaction between poor cue quality and task difficulty.     

Cross-language sensitivity to phonotactic patterns in infants

This study explored sensitivity to word-level phonotactic patterns in English and Japanese monolingual infants. Infants at the ages of 6, 12, and 18 months were tested on their ability to discriminate between test words using a habituation-switch experimental paradigm. All of the test words, neek, neeks, and neekusu, are phonotactically legitimate for English, whereas the first two words are critically noncanonical in Japanese. The language-specific phonotactical congruence influenced infants' performance in discrimination. English-learning infants could discriminate between neek and neeks at the age of 18 months, but Japanese infants could not. There was a similar developmental pattern for infants of both language groups for discrimination of neek and neeks, but Japanese infants showed a different trajectory from English infants for neekusu/neeks. These differences reflect the different status of these word patterns with respect to the phonotactics of both languages, and reveal early sensitivity to subtle phonotactic and language input patterns in each language.     

兴奋模式下谐波复合音音高感知机制的研究

通过测量谐波复合音的基频辨别阈,探讨中等"高次谐波"的音高感知是否依赖于谐波的可分离性,以及掩蔽音对实验结果的影响。实验方法:在目标音单独存在或目标音与掩蔽音混合时,将刺激通过高、中、低三个带通滤波器以获得不同的谐波可分离度。实验刺激设计为5种基频差异和4种相位组合。五名被试均为年轻人,纯音听阈≤15 dB HL。研究结果发现:谐波复合音的基频辨别阈随着信号频段的上移而增大;目标音和掩蔽音的基频差异对基频辨别阈有显著影响;但相位影响不显著。结论:谐波的可分离性对基频辨别阈有显著影响,但中等"高次谐波"的音高感知不依赖于可分离性;混合音的大部分音高感知结果与兴奋模式的峰值大小密切相关。      

Perception of native and non-native affricate-fricative contrasts: cross-language tests on adults and infants

Previous studies have shown improved sensitivity to native-language contrasts and reduced sensitivity to non-native phonetic contrasts when comparing 6-8 and 10-12-month-old infants. This developmental pattern is interpreted as reflecting the onset of language-specific processing around the first birthday. However, generalization of this finding is limited by the fact that studies have yielded inconsistent results and that insufficient numbers of phonetic contrasts have been tested developmentally; this is especially true for native-language phonetic contrasts. Three experiments assessed the effects of language experience on affricate-fricative contrasts in a cross-language study of English and Mandarin adults and infants. Experiment 1 showed that English-speaking adults score lower than Mandarin-speaking adults on Mandarin alveolo-palatal affricate-fricative discrimination. Experiment 2 examined developmental change in the discrimination of this contrast in English- and Mandarin-leaning infants between 6 and 12 months of age. The results demonstrated that native-language performance significantly improved with age while performance on the non-native contrast decreased. Experiment 3 replicated the perceptual improvement for a native contrast: 6-8 and 10-12-month-old English-learning infants showed a performance increase at the older age. The results add to our knowledge of the developmental patterns of native and non-native phonetic perception.     

Temporal order discrimination of tonal sequences by younger and older adults: the role of duration and rate

The effect of tone duration and presentation rate on the discrimination of the temporal order of the middle two tones of a four-tone sequence was investigated in young normal-hearing (YNH) and older hearing-impaired (OHI) listeners. The frequencies and presentation level of the tone sequences were selected to minimize the effect of hearing loss on the performance of the OHI listeners. Tone durations varied from 20 to 400 ms and presentation rates from 2.5 to 25 toness. Two experiments were conducted with anisochronous (nonuniform duration and rate across entire sequence) and isochronous (uniform rate and duration) sequences, respectively. For the YNH listeners, performance for both isochronous and anisochronous sequences was determined primarily by presentation rate such that performance decreased at rates faster than 5 toness. For anisochronous tone sequences alone, the effects of rate were more pronounced at short tone durations. For the OHI listeners, both presentation rate and tone duration had an impact on performance for both isochronous and anisochronous sequences such that performance decreased as rate increased above 5 toness or duration decreased below 40 ms. Temporal masking was offered as an explanation for the interaction of short durations and fast rates on temporal order discrimination for the anisochronous sequences.     

Holographic character recognition using weighted patterns

As the method of improving the discrimination in character recognition using holographic spatial filtering, this paper proposes a pattern weighting technique which emphasizes differences between characters. Its merit is in the capability of optimally setting the correlations which leads to the feasibility of discrimination. By using weighted patterns obtained by computer calculations, its effectiveness is experimentally proved.     

Informational processing of complex sound. I: Intensity discrimination

This paper reports on some initial experiments using the sample discrimination paradigm to investigate normal-hearing listeners' ability to process information in complex, nonspeech sounds. An important feature of the sample discrimination experiment is that the value of the difference to be discriminated randomly varies from trial to trial. It is this variation that yields potential information. In the present study, listeners heard a pair of multitone complexes (or sequences) on each trial. The individual levels of the tones were drawn from two normal distributions differing only in mean. The listener's task was to identify the sound having the higher mean tone level. For an ideal observer in these experiments, performance in d' grows as the square root n, where n is the number of tones. Obtained d' grew more nearly as the cube root of n regardless of whether the tones were played sequentially or simultaneously or whether they were increased in number from high frequencies to low or from low frequencies to high. A preliminary model is proposed in which discrimination performance depends predominantly on the information content of the sounds and is largely independent of the physical dimensions along which the sounds vary. Information content is defined in terms of the variance of the underlying stimulus distributions and a stimulus equivocation factor that is derived from the data. Based on this model, transmitted information is estimated to be between 1.0 and 2.6 bits.