Abstract
If it is well known that knowledge facilitates higher cognitive functions, such as visual and auditory word recognition, little is known about the influence of knowledge on detection, particularly in the auditory modality. Our study tested the influence of phonological and lexical knowledge on auditory detection. Words, pseudo-words, and complex non-phonological sounds, energetically matched as closely as possible, were presented at a range of presentation levels from sub-threshold to clearly audible. The participants performed a detection task (Experiments 1 and 2) that was followed by a two alternative forced-choice recognition task in Experiment 2. The results of this second task in Experiment 2 suggest a correct recognition of words in the absence of detection with a subjective threshold approach. In the detection task of both experiments, phonological stimuli (words and pseudo-words) were better detected than non-phonological stimuli (complex sounds), presented close to the auditory threshold. This finding suggests an advantage of speech for signal detection. An additional advantage of words over pseudo-words was observed in Experiment 2, suggesting that lexical knowledge could also improve auditory detection when listeners had to recognize the stimulus in a subsequent task. Two simulations of detection performance performed on the sound signals confirmed that the advantage of speech over non-speech processing could not be attributed to energetic differences in the stimuli.
Highlights
Detection can be performed without involving any knowledgebased processing
Post hoc analysis revealed that the participants obtained better detection performance for dB-SPL than for dB-A for complex sounds only (p = 0.03), but not for words (p = 0.07), or pseudo-words (p = 0.99)
For levels 4–8, the planned comparisons revealed that words were better detected than pseudo-words [F(1,18) = 7.01, p = 0.016] and complex sounds [F(1,18) = 59.80, p < 0.001], and pseudo-words were better detected than complex sounds [F(1,18) = 17.28, p < 0.001]
Summary
Detection can be performed without involving any knowledgebased processing. it has been shown that knowledge about a visual stimulus can influence its detection. A pseudo-word superiority effect (PWSE) has been reported in the visual modality (Baron and Thurston, 1973; McClelland, 1976; McClelland and Johnston, 1977; Grainger and Jacobs, 1994) This effect refers to facilitated perception due to phonological features of the stimulus: target letters are better identified when they are part of a pseudoword than when they are part of a non-word (e.g., McClelland and Rumelhart, 1981; Maris, 2002). When a phoneme in a spoken sentence was replaced by a non-speech sound, the participants’ lexical knowledge filled in the missing speech sound: they were not aware of the missing phoneme and could not specify the location of the non-speech sound in the sentence they had just heard (Warren, 1970, 1984; Warren and Obusek, 1971; Warren and Sherman, 1974; see Pitt and Samuel, 1993)
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