Multiple phonemic restorations follow the rules for auditory induction.

Abstract

Addition of noise to gaps produced by deletion of speech segments can result in both illusory continuity and increased intelligibility. Earlier findings suggest that the perceptual restoration of speech may represent a linguistic adaptation of a nonverbal phenomenon. “Auditory induction” permits perceptual synthesis of contextually appropriate sounds when deleted segments of a signal are replaced by a potential masker. In Experiment 1, when intelligible narrowband discourse was periodically interrupted by silence and by one of a number of bands of noise having different center frequencies, the illusory restoration of continuity was found to follow the spectral rules for nonverbal auditory induction. In Experiment 2, the durational limit of illusory continuity was determined for several types of broadband speech interrupted by broadband noise. The limiting duration was longest for normal discourse interrupted by noise and was equal to the average word duration of that stimulus. The results suggest that auditory induction becomes coupled with special linguistic mechanisms permitting perceptual synthesis of verbal components from noise, with the size of the segments dependent upon the extent of contextual information.