Temporal Structure and Interpretability in the Classification of Nonspeech Acoustic Patterns.
James H. Howard, Ballas Jr., A. James · 1981
Two experiments investigated the role of syntactic (sequential structure) and semantic factors in the classification of complex environmental sound patterns. The results of the first experiment were consistent with our earlier findings in revealing that sequentially structured, interpretable patterns are classified more accurately than unstructured patterns, an explicitly provided semantic context enhances initial classification performance with interpretable patterns, however, no semantically-related enhancement results with unstructured, uninterpretable patterns. Experiment 2 examined classification of sequentially-structured, but minimally-interpretable patterns. The results showed that sequential structure alone can lead to optimal classification performance, and providing explicit semantic information impaired performance with these patterns. In both experiments listeners appeared to learn something about the composition rules used to produce the target patterns rather than simple paired-associate responses. Syntactic and semantic factors play a role in the classification of complex nonspeech patterns. (Author)