The influence of practice on the detectability of auditory sinusoidal amplitude modulation

Abstract

The capacity to detect fluctuations in sound amplitude influences the perception of many everyday sounds, including speech. Here, the influence of practice on this ability was investigated. Between two testing sessions, one group of nine listeners who were tested on the detection of sinusoidal amplitude modulation (SAM) improved by about 0.7 dB on each of five conditions (300 trials/condition). Nine other listeners participated in these same sessions, but between them, practiced 4320 trials detecting the presence of 80-Hz SAM with a 3- to 4-kHz narrow-band carrier. Only three of these listeners, who had among the highest initial detection thresholds on the trained condition, improved during this training phase. These learners subsequently improved at untrained modulation rates (30 and 150 Hz) with the trained carrier, but not at the trained modulation rate with untrained carriers (0.5–1.5 kHz and 0–5 kHz). These data suggest that (1) at some stage, modulation processing is more linked to the carrier spectrum than to the modulation rate, and (2) while most normal-hearing listeners reach their best modulation-detection performance with minimal experience, listeners with high initial thresholds benefit from extended practice. Thus, training may aid populations that have difficulty detecting amplitude modulation. [Work supported by NIDCD.]