Preliminary Research on Perceiving Patterns of Underwater Acoustic Transients

Abstract

The present studies were conducted to determine whether an implicit structure or grammar has an effect on a listener's ability to classify transient patterns. Three experiments were conducted. In each there were two groups, one which learned a set of structured patterns and one which learned a set of random patterns. In the first study, the structure was syntactic and pure tones were used to construct the patterns. In the second study, the structure was also only syntactic but a semantic structure was implied by using meaningful sounds. In the third study, both syntactic and semantic structure were used and the stimuli were water related acoustic transients. The results indicated that the listeners used the structure to identify the patterns even though they were unaware of its exact nature. The strongest facilitation was produced by both syntactic and semantic structure. Syntactic structure generally facilitated the listener's task but not as much when a semantic structure was implied but not present. In this case, the listeners' attempts to find a semantic structure interfered with their utilization of the syntactic structure.