Determination of temporal discriminations by an adjustment procedure
T. Dean Clack, Peter Benson · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1979
Identification of initial stop consonants along the voicing continuum exhibits sharp category boundaries as demonstrated with experimental manipulations of the voice onset times of natural and synthetic speech. The existence of discrimination thresholds for temporal onset differences has been suggested as a simple explanation of this phenomenon. Evidence of such a threshold for simple nonspeech sounds has been obtained using the ABX method, but with considerable inconsistencies among listeners [D. Pisoni, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 61, 1352–1361 (1977); P. J. Benson and T. D. Clack, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. Suppl. 1 65, 58(A) (1979)]. This variability might be primarily methodological in origin and consequently a different psychophysical procedure has been developed. Discrimination thresholds were determined by an adjustment procedure similar to Bekesy audiometry. The results for the same subjects and listening conditions are evaluated relative to our previous ABX results.