Auditory Judgments Research Articles

Development of auditory selective attention: why children struggle to hear in noisy environments.

Children’s hearing deteriorates markedly in the presence of unpredictable noise. To explore why, 187 school-age children (4–11 years) and 15 adults performed a tone-in-noise detection task, in which the masking noise varied randomly between every presentation. Selective attention was evaluated by measuring the degree to which listeners were influenced by (i.e., gave weight to) each spectral region of the stimulus. Psychometric fits were also used to estimate levels of internal noise and bias. Levels of masking were found to decrease with age, becoming adult-like by 9–11 years. This change was explained by improvements in selective attention alone, with older listeners better able to ignore noise similar in frequency to the target. Consistent with this, age-related differences in masking were abolished when the noise was made more distant in frequency to the target. This work offers novel evidence that improvements in selective attention are critical for the normal development of auditory judgments.

Gender conflict resolution in Spanish–Basque mixed DPs

This study analyzes gender assignment in Spanish–Basque mixed nominal constructions with nouns in Basque (a language that lacks gender) and determiners in Spanish (a language that marks gender) by using a multi-task approach: (i) naturalistic data, (ii) an elicitation task, and (iii) an auditory judgment task. Naturalistic data suggest cross-language effects under which a morphological marker of Basque (-a determiner) is interpreted as a morphophonological expression of gender marking in Spanish. A preference for feminine determiners was observed in the judgment task, which differs from the masculine default trend observed in Spanish–English bilinguals (Jake, Myers-Scotton & Gross, 2002). Our results point to feminine gender as default in Spanish–Basque mixed DPs, indicating that the resources that bilinguals use for gender assignment can be different from those of monolinguals. We argue that this is an outcome of interacting processes which take place at the interfaces (lexicon, phonology, morphosyntax) of both languages, resulting in cross-language effects.

Sound preferences of the dense urban environment: Soundscape of Cairo

A questionnaire study was conducted to investigate the soundscape preferences of the sonic environment in Cairo. Participants, who were Cairo residents, were questioned about their appraisal of familiar urban soundscapes in a close- and open-ended format questionnaire.Psycholinguistic data analysis of verbal descriptions expressed by respondents was conducted to identify the relevance of semantic categories of environmental sounds and quantitative soundscape aspects for the urban sonic environment of Cairo. Results confirmed a direct relevance of the linguistic semantic auditory judgment and of the outputs of the quantitative close-ended questions. Cairenes were also found to express their sonic environment linguistically based on physical properties rather than semantic features and values.Analyzing the relative annoyance increase (RAI) of the close-ended part, overall positive RAI values for all sound categories reveal how sensitive to noise Cairo residents are. Results further showed that at an RAI value of approximately 27%, sound category perception transforms from positive to negative.

Division of processing resources in auditory judgments

The attention operating characteristic (AOC) displays joint performance in a dual-task paradigm. Sampling theory allows the AOC to be used to distinguish two tasks that share resources from two tasks that call upon independent resources. Work in the Hafter lab over the past twenty years has examined the division of resources from several different perspectives. This talk will review data on intensity discrimination and identification showing that “easier” tasks can cause dual-task costs, while “harder” tasks can have no costs associated with the dual-task. Recent data on intensity discrimination and identification will be examined in the context of the division of processing resources, showing that the costs of sharing resources can increase with age of the listener. Finally, suggestions will be made for ways in which the current enthusiasm for the dual-task paradigm in clinical research can be used to improve our theoretical understanding of attention and memory as well as demonstrating the effects of various impairments and prostheses.

Measurable acoustic variants as predictors of progress in speech therapy

Despite the availability of free, user-friendly acoustic analysis programs, acoustic documentation of speech sound change during speech therapy is rarely mentioned in speech research literature. Thus, the utility of acoustic analysis to document speech change over time in children with speech errors is unknown. A prior study documented children’s /s/ productions as they progressed through speech therapy and compared spectrographic analysis of productions to clinicians’ perceptual judgments of accuracy. Results indicated a greater number of /s/ productions were judged accurate based on visual (acoustic) analysis vs auditory (perceptual) judgment for all clients, particularly during a period of time when clients’ /s/ productions were becoming more frequently accurate. The purpose of this current investigation is to identify the measurable acoustic features of /s/ production that indicate when an individual’s /s/ production is improving even when the productions are still heard as incorrect. By comparing productions identified as correct visually but incorrect auditorily to productions identified the same both visually and auditorily, this study identifies acoustic variants that are indicative of subtle improvements in production not yet identifiable by adult listeners. These subtle, yet measurable, acoustic characteristics may identify potential acoustic markers for sound maturation in children’s disordered speech production.

Emphatic gemination in Japanese mimetic words: a wug-test with auditory stimuli

Building on ħ0305protectNasu, 1999), this paper reports an auditory judgment study of emphatic gemination in Japanese mimetic words. The study replicates Nasu’s results that given C1VC2V–C3VC4V mimetic words, speakers by default target C2 for gemination, but that they can also geminate C3 if geminating C2 would result in a marked geminate. The experiment further reveals that Japanese speakers prefer stop geminates the most, fricative geminates less, and nasal geminates the least. This finding shows that speakers have differential preferences between the structures that exist in their language, supporting a growing body of experimental studies demonstrating that native speakers do not treat all attested structures alike.

An assessment of virtual auditory distance judgments among blind and sighted listeners

Auditory distance perception is a crucial component of blind listeners’ spatial awareness. Many studies have reported supra-normal spatial auditory abilities among blind individuals, such as enhanced azimuthal localization [Voss et al. (2004)] and distance discrimination [Kolarik et al. (in press)]. However, it is not known whether blind listeners are better able to use acoustic information to enhance judgments of distance to single sound sources, or whether lack of visual spatial cues prevents calibration of auditory distance information, leading to worse performance than for sighted listeners. Blind and sighted listeners were presented with single, stationary virtual sound sources between 1.22 and 13.79 m away in a virtual anechoic environment simulated using an image-source model. Stimuli were spoken sentences. Sighted listeners systematically underestimated distance to remote virtual sources, while blind listeners overestimated the distance to nearby virtual sources and underestimated it for remote virtual sources. The findings suggest that blind listeners are less accurate at judging absolute distance, and experience a compression of the auditory world, relative to sighted listeners. The results support a perceptual deficiency hypothesis for absolute distance judgments, suggesting that compensatory processes for audition do not develop among blind listeners when estimating the distance to single, stationary sound sources.

The Effects of Vision-Related Aspects on Noise Perception of Wind Turbines in Quiet Areas

Preserving the soundscape and geographic extension of quiet areas is a great challenge against the wide-spreading of environmental noise. The E.U. Environmental Noise Directive underlines the need to preserve quiet areas as a new aim for the management of noise in European countries. At the same time, due to their low population density, rural areas characterized by suitable wind are considered appropriate locations for installing wind farms. However, despite the fact that wind farms are represented as environmentally friendly projects, these plants are often viewed as visual and audible intruders, that spoil the landscape and generate noise. Even though the correlations are still unclear, it is obvious that visual impacts of wind farms could increase due to their size and coherence with respect to the rural/quiet environment. In this paper, by using the Immersive Virtual Reality technique, some visual and acoustical aspects of the impact of a wind farm on a sample of subjects were assessed and analyzed. The subjects were immersed in a virtual scenario that represented a situation of a typical rural outdoor scenario that they experienced at different distances from the wind turbines. The influence of the number and the colour of wind turbines on global, visual and auditory judgment were investigated. The main results showed that, regarding the number of wind turbines, the visual component has a weak effect on individual reactions, while the colour influences both visual and auditory individual reactions, although in a different way.

An Introduction to the Special Issue on Multisensory Perception

The annual meeting of the International Multisensory Research Forum (IMRF) in 2011 was initially to be held in June, in downtown Sendai, Japan. Three months before the date, the mega-earthquake devastated the northeast area of Japan, and subsequent tsunami hit its coastline. Downtown Sendai is 15 km from the coast and was not significantly affected by the tsunami. However, it is located to the direct west of the epicenter, and the conference venue and the public transportation were so badly damaged that we could not expect then their recovery in time. Therefore, we decided to postpone the conference and move its location; the meeting was held on October 17–20 in Fukuoka, Japan. Although a few delegates could not attend the conference with new date and location, IMRF 2011 was successful with presentations all relating to multisensory research by researchers from a wide range of disciplines. We are delighted that this special issue is published in i-Perception, the first time for the IMRF. Contributions to the conference on various aspects of multisensory perception resulted in seven articles in this special issue. The first three papers report studies on the interaction between two sensory inputs, for example, audiovisual integration. Leone and McCourt (2013) revealed a new aspect of facilitative audiovisual integration that disagrees with the well-known idea of inverse effectiveness. Tanabe and Iwaki (2013) found perceptual effects of visual spatial information on auditory temporal order judgments and simultaneity judgments. Speech-oriented research by Spector and Maurer (2013) suggested naturally biased correspondences between vowel sound and shape, investigating the influence of vowels on sound–shape matching in toddlers. The second aspect addresses multisensory situations involving a dynamic perceiver. The interaction between body movement and other major senses has attracted increasing interest, particularly those researchers who are familiar with virtual reality technologies. On visuo-motor coordination, Kitazaki (2013) revealed that visuo-motor adaptation was transferable from right to left, between upper and lower, between central and peripheral visual fields. On auditory–motor coordination, Honda et al. (2013) showed that free head movements and proprioceptive feedback during sound localization training enhance perceptual motor learning. The last aspect of multisensory perception covered in this special issue is about understanding human perception in natural and practical environments. Jola et al. (2013) used fMRI to measure brain activities when observers were watching and/or listening to a long movie of Indian dance, that is, relatively in natural viewing conditions. Seya, Nakayasu, and Yagi (2013) used a driving simulator to define the spatial distribution of useful field of view in driving by measuring reaction times and eye movements. We hope that readers will enjoy the diversity of topics in research on multisensory perception. Additionally, it is our great pleasure to share some of the fruitful outcomes of the conference as the last part of the IMRF 2011 organizing project.

Effect of Visual Stimuli on Temporal Order Judgments of a Sequence of Pure Tones

We investigated what effect visual spatial information had on auditory temporal order judgments (TOJs) and examined what effect visual stimuli had on the TOJs of sequences of pure tones in experiment 1. The auditory stimuli were sequences of four distinct pure tones. The visual stimuli consisted of two vertically aligned flashes: one flashed before the first tone and the other flashed after the last tone. Participants judged whether the temporal order of the second and third tones in auditory stimuli occurred with the higher tone being first or the lower tone being first. As a result, the proportion of responses for higher-tone-first increased when the flash of the upper LED preceded that of the lower LED, independent of the actual temporal order. Participants in experiment 2 were asked to make simultaneity judgments instead, which were also affected by visual stimuli. The auditory stimuli in experiment 3 were the same as those in experiment 1, whereas the visual stimuli consisted of two horizontally aligned flashes. Furthermore, the participants made TOJs, which were not affected by the horizontally aligned visual stimuli. We concluded that vertically aligned visual stimuli had an effect on auditory TOJs with some response bias.

Nothing Is Irrelevant in a Noisy World: Sensory Illusions Reveal Obligatory within-and across-Modality Integration

In the "flash-beep illusion," a single light flash is perceived as multiple flashes when presented in close temporal proximity to multiple auditory beeps. Accounts of this illusion argue that temporal auditory information interferes with visual information because temporal acuity is better in audition than vision. However, it may also be that whenever there are multiple sensory inputs, the interference caused by a to-be-ignored stimulus on an attended stimulus depends on the likelihood that the stimuli are perceived as coming from a single distal source. Here we explore, in human observers, perceptual interactions between competing auditory and visual inputs while varying spatial proximity, which affects object formation. When two spatially separated streams are presented in the same (visual or auditory) modality, temporal judgments about a target stream from one direction are biased by the content of the competing distractor stream. Cross-modally, auditory streams from both target and distractor directions bias the perceived number of events in a target visual stream; however, importantly, the auditory stream from the target direction influences visual judgments more than does the auditory stream from the opposite hemifield. As in the original flash-beep illusion, visual streams weakly influence auditory judgments, regardless of spatial proximity. We also find that perceptual interference in the flash-beep illusion is similar to within-modality interference from a competing same-modality stream. Results reveal imperfect and obligatory within- and across-modality integration of information, and hint that the strength of these interactions depends on object binding.

Incorporating cepstral peak prominence as an acoustic method for assessing variation in voice quality

Cepstral Peak Prominence (CPP) has been proposed as a means of assessing breathiness from recordings (Hillenbrand et al., J. Speech and Hearing Res. 37(1994):769-78). CPP involves computing the deviation of the cepstral peak in a smoothed cepstrum from a regression function for the smoothed cepstrum. It has not been tested extensively, though the few evaluative studies, involving comparisons against auditory judgments of voice quality, have yielded positive results. Previous evaluations have not assessed the use of CPP for comparisons of inter-group or intra-individual variation. A reliable way to gauge breathiness is useful not only for therapeutic purposes, but also for informing researchers about a speaker’s repertoire and identity construction. This study examines the efficacy of CPP for analyzing social variables at the individual and group levels, using African American and European American subjects producing read and spontaneous speech under controlled conditions. Results show intra-speaker consistency across speaking tasks, but no consistent inter-ethnic differences. These findings suggest that some aspects of phonation may be more important for individual identity than for group identity.

Concert Hall Sound Clarity: A Comparison of Auditory Judgments and Objective Measures

AbstractThe purpose of the study was to compare auditory judgments of sound clarity of music examples recorded in a concert hall with predictions of clarity made from the impulse response signal recorded in the same hall. Auditory judgments were made with the use of two methods: by rating sound clarity on a numerical scale with two endpoints, and by absolute magnitude estimation. Results obtained by both methods were then compared against the values of clarity indices,C80andC50, determined from the impulse response of the concert hall, measured in places in which the microphone was located during recording of music examples. Results show that auditory judgments of sound clarity and predictions made from theC80index yield a similar rank order of data, but the relation between theC80scale and perceived sound clarity is nonlinear. The data also show that the values ofC80andC50indices are in very close agreement.

Modality differences in timing and temporal memory throughout the lifespan

The perception of time is heavily influenced by attention and memory, both of which change over the lifespan. In the current study, children (8 yrs), young adults (18–25 yrs), and older adults (60–75 yrs) were tested on a duration bisection procedure using 3 and 6-s auditory and visual signals as anchor durations. During test, participants were exposed to a range of intermediate durations, and the task was to indicate whether test durations were closer to the “short” or “long” anchor. All groups reproduced the classic finding that “sounds are judged longer than lights”. This effect was greater for older adults and children than for young adults, but for different reasons. Replicating previous results, older adults made similar auditory judgments as young adults, but underestimated the duration of visual test stimuli. Children showed the opposite pattern, with similar visual judgments as young adults but overestimation of auditory stimuli. Psychometric functions were analyzed using the Sample Known Exactly-Mixed Memory quantitative model of the Scalar Timing Theory of interval timing. Results indicate that children show an auditory-specific deficit in reference memory for the anchors, rather than a general bias to overestimate time and that aged adults show an exaggerated tendency to judge visual stimuli as “short” due to a reduction in the availability of controlled attention.

The sound of time: Cross-modal convergence in the spatial structuring of time

In a new integration, we show that the visual-spatial structuring of time converges with auditory-spatial left-right judgments for time-related words. In Experiment 1, participants placed past and future-related words respectively to the left and right of the midpoint on a horizontal line, reproducing earlier findings. In Experiment 2, neutral and time-related words were presented over headphones. Participants were asked to indicate whether words were louder on the left or right channel. On critical experimental trials, words were presented equally loud binaurally. As predicted, participants judged future words to be louder on the right channel more often than past-related words. Furthermore, there was a significant cross-modal overlap between the visual-spatial ordering (Experiment 1) and the auditory judgments (Experiment 2), which were continuously related. These findings provide support for the assumption that space and time have certain invariant properties that share a common structure across modalities.

Orthographic effects in rhyme monitoring tasks: Are they automatic?

Over the last 30 years or so, various findings have been reported which suggest that the perception of spoken words may involve the automatic coactivation of orthographic properties. Here we assessed this possibility in auditory rhyme judgement tasks and replicated a classic finding reported by Seidenberg and Tanenhaus (1979), showing that orthographic similarity between stimuli facilitated responses on rhyming pairs, but had the opposite effect on nonrhyming pairs. However, Experiments 2 and 3 showed that manipulating the nature of the nonrhymes, or adding a large proportion of filler items, eliminated the effects of orthographic match or mismatch. These findings suggest the involvement of strategic factors in the emergence of orthographic effects in rhyme judgement tasks.

Visual determinants of a cross-modal illusion

Contrary to the predictions of established theory, Schutz and Lipscomb (2007) have shown that visual information can influence the perceived duration of concurrent sounds. In the present study, we deconstruct the visual component of their illusion, showing that (1) cross-modal influence depends on visible cues signaling an impact event (namely, a sudden change of direction concurrent with tone onset) and (2) the illusion is controlled primarily by the duration of post-impact motion. Other aspects of the post-impact motion--distance traveled, velocity, acceleration, and the rate of its change (i.e., its derivative, jerk)--play a minor role, if any. Together, these results demonstrate that visual event duration can influence the perception of auditory event duration, but only when stimulus cues are sufficient to give rise to the perception of a causal cross-modal relationship. This refined understanding of the illusion's visual aspects is helpful in comprehending why it contrasts so markedly with previous research on cross-modal integration, demonstrating that vision does not appreciably influence auditory judgments of event duration (Walker & Scott, 1981).

Functional neuroimaging of grammatical class: Ambiguous and unambiguous nouns and verbs

Neuropsychological and neuroimaging studies of grammatical-class differences suggest that nouns and verbs may be associated with different brain regions. The current functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study focused on auditory grammaticality judgements of two-word stimuli consisting of noun/verb ambiguous and unambiguous nouns and verbs preceded by either “the” or “to”. The fMRI results showed effects of class ambiguity in the left inferior frontal gyrus, possibly due to greater selection demands, and effects of grammaticality (“yes” vs. “no” response) in left superior temporal gyrus, consistent with greater activation for trials with greater conflict. In addition, posterior left temporal lobe regions showed increased activity on unambiguous trials for verbs than for nouns, consistent with prior imaging studies. Thus, in a task specifically focused on the grammatical (rather than semantic) aspects of words and that used morphologically simple nouns and verbs controlled for imageability, verbs preferentially activated posterior temporal but not frontal lobe regions. However, for ambiguous trials in this same region, nouns showed greater activation than verbs, suggesting that these effects can be modulated by class ambiguity.

The effect of tone envelope on sensory integration: support for the 'unity assumption'

Research on the integration of auditory and visual sensory information consistently confirms the optimal integration hypothesis, according to which information is weighted according to its relative quality. Thus, since the auditory system has greater temporal resolution, this hypothesis predicts that visual information will not affect auditory judgments of duration. In conflict with this hypothesis, Schutz & Lipscomb (2007) report that percussionists use visual information to alter audience perception of note duration. To show that this discrepancy arises from the acoustic characteristics of percussive sounds, we paired visual information derived from a striking motion with pure tones exhibiting two types of envelopes: percussive (sharp onset followed by exponential decay) and flat (sharp onset to a fixed level, followed by sharp offset) envelopes. Visual information affected auditory duration judgments only for the tones with percussive envelopes (e.g. the sounds produced by a striking motion). As ratings of percussive tones were no more variable than ratings of flat tones, the difference cannot be explained by "ambiguity" of percussive-tone duration. In contrast to the notion of optimal integration, we conclude that envelope is an important acoustic cue for cross-modal integration and offers important information regarding event identification.

Crossmodal spatial attention shift produced by centrally presented gaze cues

Abstract: Despite previous failures to identify visual-upon-auditory spatial-cuing effects, recent studies have demonstrated that the abrupt onset of a lateralized visual stimulus triggers a shift of spatial attention in response to auditory judgment. Nevertheless, whether a centrally presented visual stimulus orients auditory attention remained unclear. The present study investigated whether centrally presented gaze cues trigger a reflexive shift of attention in response to auditory judgment. Participants fixated on a schematic face in which the eyes looked left or right (the cue). A target sound was then presented to the left or right of the cue. Participants judged the direction of the target as quickly as possible. Even though participants were told that the gaze direction did not predict the direction of the target, the response time was significantly faster when the gaze was in the target direction than when it was in the non-target direction. These findings provide initial evidence for visual-upon-auditory spatial-cuing effects produced by centrally presented cues, suggesting that a reflexive crossmodal shift of attention does occur with a centrally presented visual stimulus.