A performance-oriented approach to the hearing of complex sounds: Nonspeech and speech
Charles S. Watson · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1989
Two general questions have been addressed with experiments using word-length tonal sequences, or “patterns”: to what degree can the discriminability of complex auditory patterns be predicted from listeners' performance with simpler stimuli, especially single tones presented in isolation? and, (2) How do listeners' abilities to extract information from complex nonspeech sounds compare to their abilities to resolve the details of the waveforms of speech? The answers appear to be consistent with the results of comparable investigations conducted for the past half-century in the field of vision. Very little degradation in sensitivity or resolving power for components of complex sounds can be attributed to the complex stimulus context per se, aside, of course, from temporal masking. When patterns vary from trial to trial, selective attention and accurate discrimination performance can be achieved only when prior experience has made them so familiar that processing has become “automatic.” Listeners' remarkable resolving power for speech sounds can readily be imitated by overtraining them on the discrimination of at least some nonspeech sounds.