The relationship between auditory temporal resolution and auditory object formation

Abstract

The goal of the present experiment was to determine whether a relationship exists between auditory temporal resolution and the ability to use amplitude modulation for auditory object formation in sentence perception. A standard gap detection task was used to evaluate temporal resolution in listeners [D. P. Phillips, T. L. Taylor, S. E. Hall, M. M. Carr, and J. E. Mossop, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 101, 3694–3705 (1997)]. Each stimulus consisted of a leading element, a silent duration, and a trailing element. Both within- and between-channel detection was measured. An adaptive tracking procedure (PEST) was used to determine the 70%-correct gap durations for each subject. Next, a sentence identification task was used to evaluate listeners’ abilities to use amplitude modulation to extract speech from noise. Time Varying Sinusoidal (TVS) sentences were created for this purpose [T. D. Carrell and J. M. Opie, Percept. Psychophys. 52, 437–445 (1992)]. Half of the TVS sentences were amplitude modulated at 100 Hz and half remained unmodulated. The difference in intelligibility between the modulated and unmodulated sentences was used as a measure of auditory object formation. No correlation was found between gap discriminability and auditory object improvement among the subjects we tested. A wider range of subjects is currently being investigated.