The influence of linguistic experience on the cognitive processing of pitch in speech and nonspeech sounds.

In the present experiment, the authors tested Mandarin and English listeners on a range of auditory tasks to investigate whether long-term linguistic experience influences the cognitive processing of nonspeech sounds. As expected, Mandarin listeners identified Mandarin tones significantly more accurately than English listeners; however, performance did not differ across the listener groups on a pitch discrimination task requiring fine-grained discrimination of simple nonspeech sounds. The crucial finding was that cross-language differences emerged on a nonspeech pitch contour identification task: The Mandarin listeners more often misidentified flat and falling pitch contours than the English listeners in a manner that could be related to specific features of the sound structure of Mandarin, which suggests that the effect of linguistic experience extends to nonspeech processing under certain stimulus and task conditions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Higher order pattern structure influences auditory representational momentum.

Representational momentum refers to the phenomenon that observers tend to incorrectly remember an event undergoing real or implied motion as shifted beyond its actual final position. This has been demonstrated in both visual and auditory domains. In 5 pitch discrimination experiments, listeners heard tone sequences that implied either linear, periodic, or null motions in pitch space. Their task was to judge whether the pitch of a probe tone following each sequence was the same or different from the final sequence tone. Results suggested that listeners made errors consistent with extrapolation of coherent pitch patterns (linear, periodic) but not with incoherent (null) ones. Hypotheses associated with internalized physical principles and pattern-based expectations are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Temporal analysis and stimulus fluctuation in listeners with normal and impaired hearing

The first experiment investigated the effects of mild to moderate sensorineural hearing impairment on temporal analysis for noise stimuli of varying bandwidth. Tasks of temporal gap detection, amplitude modulation (AM) detection, and AM discrimination were examined. Relatively high levels of stimulation were used in order to reduce the possibility that the results of the listeners with hearing impairment would be influenced strongly by audibility. A general summary of results was that there was relatively great interlistener variation among the listeners with hearing impairment, with most listeners showing normal performance and some showing degraded performance, regardless of the bandwidth of the stimulus carrying the temporal information. A second experiment investigated the hypothesis that listeners with sensorineural hearing impairment might have poor gap detection due to loudness recruitment. Here, gap markers were presented at levels where loudness growth was steeper for the listeners with hearing impairment than for the listeners with normal hearing. Although gap detection was sometimes poorer in listeners with hearing impairment than in listeners with normal hearing, there was no clear relation between gap detection performance and loudness recruitment in listeners with mild to moderate sensorineural hearing impairment.     

Pitch and time, tonality and meter: How do musical dimensions combine?

The authors examined how the structural attributes of tonality and meter influence musical pitch–time relations. Listeners heard a musical context followed by probe events that varied in pitch class and temporal position. Tonal and metric hierarchies contributed additively to the goodness-of-fit of probes, with pitch class exerting a stronger influence than temporal position (Experiment 1), even when listeners attempted to ignore pitch (Experiment 2). Speeded classification tasks confirmed this asymmetry. Temporal classification was biased by tonal stability (Experiment 3), but pitch classification was unaffected by temporal position (Experiment 4). Experiments 5 and 6 ruled out explanations based on the presence of pitch classes and temporal positions in the context, unequal stimulus quantity, and discriminability. The authors discuss how typical Western music biases attention toward pitch and distinguish between dimensional discriminability and salience. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of aging and musical experience on the representation of tonal hierarchies.

Two experiments explored the representation of the tonal hierarchy in Western music among older (aged 60 to 80) and younger (aged 15 to 22) musicians and nonmusicians. A probe tone technique was used: 4 notes from the major triad were presented, followed by 1 note chosen from the 12 notes of the chromatic scale. Whereas musicians had a better sense of the tonal hierarchy than nonmusicians, older adults were no worse than younger adults in differentiating the notes according to musical principles. However, older adults were more prone than younger adults to classify the notes by frequency proximity (pitch height) when proximity was made more salient, as were nonmusicians compared with musicians. With notes having ambiguous pitch height, pitch height effects disappeared among older adults but not nonmusicians. Older adults seem to have internalized tonal structure, but they sometimes fail to inhibit less musically relevant information. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of aging on absolute identification of duration.

Experiments to examine the effects of aging on the ability to identify temporal durations in an absolute identification task are reported. In Experiment 1, older adults were worse than younger adults in identifying a tone's position within a series of 6 tones of varied durations. In Experiment 2, participants were required to identify a tone's position in 9 tones of varied durations. Older adults' performance was again worse than that of younger adults; moreover, they showed a qualitatively different pattern of errors than younger adults. In Experiment 3, in which the tones varied in pitch, the performance of older adults was worse than that of younger adults, but the error patterns of the 2 groups were similar. The results suggest that older adults have distorted memory representations for durations but not for pitch. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Expiry date display on drug packages

This paper addresses the question of frequency discrimination of hearing for non-stationary (short) tone stimuli (duration < or = 125 ms). Shortening of the stimulus duration leads to widening of the frequency spectrum of the tone. It can be shown that for hearing no acoustical uncertainty relation holds and thus some nonlinear elements must be present in hearing physiology. We present neurophysiological and psychoacoustical findings supporting the hypothesis that frequency discrimination of non-stationary short tone stimuli is performed in neural networks of the auditory system. Neural network architectures that could process the temporal and place excitation patterns originating in the cochlea are suggested. We show how these networks (temporal coincidence network processing the temporal code and lateral inhibition network processing the place code) can be combined to show performance consistent with auditory physiology. They might explain the frequency discrimination of hearing for non-stationary short tone stimuli. We show the fitting of psychophysical relations based on these networks with the experimentally determined data.     

Perceptual interactions between musical pitch and timbre.

Three experiments examined perceptual interactions between musical pitch and timbre. Exp 1, through the use of the Garner classification tasks, found that pitch and timbre of isolated tones interact. Classification times showed interference from uncorrelated variation in the irrelevant attribute and facilitation from correlated variation; the effects were symmetrical. Exps 2 and 3 examined how musical pitch and timbre function in longer sequences. In recognition memory tasks, a target tone always appeared in a fixed position in the sequences, and listeners were instructed to attend to either its pitch or its timbre. For successive tones, no interactions between timbre and pitch were found. That is, changing the pitches of context tones did not affect timbre recognition, and vice versa. The tendency to perceive pitch in relation to other context pitches was strong and unaffected by whether timbre was constant or varying. In contrast, the relative perception of timbre was weak and was found only when pitch was constant. These results suggest that timbre is perceived more in absolute than in relative terms. Perceptual implications for creating patterns in music with timbre variations are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of subtle mid-frequency auditory dysfunction upon speech discrimination in noise

Earlier studies have indicated mid-frequency auditory dysfunction and depressed ability to discriminate speech in noise among noise-exposed listeners with high-frequency hearing loss. The present study was designed to determine whether mid-frequency dysfunction contributed to the depressed speech discrimination performance. Normal listeners, and noise-exposed and older listeners with high-frequency hearing loss listened to word lists presented in competing 'cocktail party' noise under unfiltered and low-pass filter conditions. In the low-pass filter condition the performance of the noise-exposed listeners was superior to that normal listeners, indicating that mid-frequency auditory dysfunction on the part of noise-exposed listeners does not contribute to their difficulties discriminating unfiltered speech in noise. The performance of the older listeners was below that of the two other groups in both filtered and unfiltered conditions, indicating greater difficulty discriminating speech than would be predicted only on the basis of high-frequency hearing loss.     

Success and failure at dual-task coordination by younger and older adults.

Dual-task processing was explored in younger and older adults in 2 experiments that used a tone discrimination and a letter discrimination task. To encourage parallel processing if that was possible, the authors presented the stimuli for the 2 tasks simultaneously, and participants were instructed to withhold their responses until both were ready. The authors found no evidence for parallel processing and no evidence that the management of central processing of dual tasks is qualitatively different in older adults than it is in younger adults. When one response was verbal and the other manual, the 2 responses closely coincided. When both responses were manual, the authors did find that the first response was not delayed enough to coincide with the 2nd and that this underestimation was greater in older adults. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Dual temporal pitch percepts from acoustic and electric amplitude-modulated pulse trains

Two experiments examined the perception of unmodulated and amplitude-modulated pulse trains by normally hearing listeners and cochlear implantees. Four normally hearing subjects listened to acoustic pulse trains, which were band-pass filtered between 3.9 and 5.3 kHz. Four cochlear implantees, all postlinguistically deaf users of the Mini System 22 implant, listened to current pulse trains produced at a single electrode position. In the first experiment, a set of nine loudness-balanced unmodulated stimuli with rates between 60 and 300 Hz were presented in a multidimensional scaling task. The resultant stimulus spaces for both subject groups showed a single dimension associated with the rate of the stimuli. In the second experiment, a set of ten loudness-balanced modulated stimuli was constructed, with carrier rates between 140 and 300 Hz, and modulation rates between 60 and 150 Hz. The modulation rates were integer submultiples of the carrier rates, and each modulation period consisted of one higher-intensity pulse and one or more identical lower-intensity pulses. The modulation depth of each stimulus was adjusted so that its pitch was judged to be higher or lower 50% of the time than that of an unmodulated pulse train having a rate equal to the geometric mean of the carrier and modulation rates. A multidimensional scaling task with these ten stimuli resulted in two-dimensional stimulus spaces, with dimensions corresponding to carrier and modulation rates. A further investigation with one normally hearing subject showed that the perceptual weighting of the two dimensions varied systematically with modulation depth. It was concluded that, when filtered appropriately, acoustic pulse trains can be used to produce percepts in normal listeners that share common features with those experienced by subjects listening through one channel of a cochlear implant, and that the central auditory system can extract two temporal patterns arising from the same cochlear location.     

Modulating the interference effect in timing with varying stimulus onset asynchrony.

The interference effect on time judgments, when subjects are also required to perform a concurrent nontemporal task, is one of the most reliable findings in the time perception literature. In the present study, the interference between a time discrimination task (short or long tone) and a digit classification task (even or odd digit) was analysed using the overlapping tasks paradigm. Reaction times in the digit task were shorter at longer values of stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) in Experiment 1, showing a clear modulation of interference with varying the relative position of the tasks. Using longer tone durations in Experiment 2, reaction times in the digit task were affected not only by the overlap between the tasks but also by the temporal proximity of responses in the timing and digit tasks. In Experiment 3, the effect of varying the SOA on performance on the digit task was abolished when the auditory tone was irrelevant, thus eliminating an interpretation in terms of distraction from the tone offset. We conclude that the interference effect in concurrent time discrimination and digit classification may be modulated by the degree of overlap between the tasks as well as by the overlap between late processing stages related to decision and response components in the 2 tasks. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Aging and Visual Masking: Sensory and Attentional Factors.

Visual tasks can yield quantitatively similar patterns of performance that reflect different underlying mechanisms in younger and older observers. In 3 experiments, we used the visual masking task of J. T. Enns and V. Di Lollo (1997) to examine 2 of these mechanisms: stimulus contrast and attention. Performance appeared to be equivalent for younger and older observers in some circumstances, although manipulation of contrast and attention suggested that older observers may use focal attention to enhance the perceptual clarity of the target. For older observers, impoverished visual representations may more readily be eliminated by manipulation of attention or by the presence of a mask, indicating that both attention and stimulus quality are important influences on performance. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Laterality effects for musical structure processing: A dichotic listening study.

Objective: Our study investigated hemispheric lateralization for musical structure processing using a dichotic listening paradigm with music and speech. Method: Eight chord sequences and 8 spoken syllable sequences were simultaneously presented, each to 1 ear. For the musical sequences, the final chord was expected (i.e., tonic) or less expected (i.e., subdominant). In addition to tonal function, which was task irrelevant, we manipulated the final syllable and the final timbre of the sequences for the experimental task: Participants were asked to identify the final syllable (/di/, /du/) or the timbre of the final chord (Timbre A or B). Results: Our experiment revealed a left-ear advantage for the tonal function effect on spoken syllable identification. For syllables presented to the right ear, identification was faster when the final chord of the musical sequence was a tonic chord rather than a subdominant chord (i.e., musical sequences presented to the left ear). Conclusions: The present finding extends the effect of musical structure previously observed for sung and visual syllable processing to spoken syllable processing. It further suggests a right-hemispheric specialization for the processing of musical structures in healthy listeners, as previously reported for split-brain patients (Tramo & Bharucha, 1991). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Renal and hepatic 1 alpha-hydroxylation of 25-hydroxyvitamin D3 in piglets suffering from pseudo vitamin D-deficiency rickets, type I

Research has shown that speech articulated in a clear manner is easier to understand than conversationally spoken speech in both the auditory-only (A-only) and auditory-visual (AV) domains. Because this research has been conducted using younger adults, it is unknown whether age-related changes in auditory and/or visual processing affect older adults' ability to benefit when a talker speaks clearly. The present study examined how speaking mode (clear vs conversational) and presentation mode (A-only vs AV) influenced nonsense sentence recognition by older listeners. Results showed that neither age nor hearing loss limited the amount of benefit that older adults obtained from a talker speaking clearly. However, age was inversely correlated with identification of AV (but not A-only) conversational speech, even when pure-tone thresholds were controlled statistically.     

Human amnesia and animal models of amnesia: Performance of amnesic patients on tests designed for the monkey.

The performance of amnesic patients was assessed on five tasks, which have figured prominently in the development of animal models of human amnesia in the monkey. The amnesic patients were impaired on four of these tasks (delayed nonmatching to sample, object-reward association, 8-pair concurrent discrimination learning, and an object discrimination task), in correspondence with previous findings for monkeys with bilateral medial temporal or diencephalic lesions. Moreover, performance of the amnesic patients correlated with the ability to verbalize the principle underlying the tasks and with the ability to describe and recognize the stimulus materials. These tasks therefore seem to be sensitive to the memory functions that are affected in human amnesia, and they can provide valid measures of memory impairment in studies with monkeys. For the fifth task (24-hour concurrent discrimination learning), the findings for the amnesic patients did not correspond to previous findings for operated monkeys. Whereas monkeys with medial temporal lesions reportedly learn this task at a normal rate, the amnesic patients were markedly impaired. Monkeys may learn this task differently than humans. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Tonal hierarchies in the music of North India.

Used the probe tone method to quantify the perceived hierarchy of tones of North Indian music. Indian music is tonal and has many features in common with Western music. However, the primary means of expressing tonality in Indian music is through melody, whereas in Western music it is through harmony (the use of chords). Probe tone ratings were given by Indian and Western listeners in the context of 10 North Indian rāgs (a standard set of melodic forms). These ratings confirmed the predicted hierarchical ordering. Both groups of listeners gave the highest ratings to the tonic and the 5th degree of the scale. The ratings of both groups of listeners generally reflected the pattern of tone durations in the musical contexts. This result suggests that the distribution of tones in music is a psychologically effective means of conveying the tonal hierarchy to listeners whether they are familiar with the musical tradition. Only the Indian listeners were sensitive to the scales (thāts) underlying the rāgs. There was little evidence that Western listeners assimilated the pitch materials to the major and minor diatonic system of Western music. (34 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Ear asymmetry in the discrimination of monaural tonal sequences.

Assessed monaural discrimination of frequency and intensity variations in tonal sequences by oddity and matching-to-sample tasks in 6 normal 22-25 yr. old listeners. Left-ear accuracy was significantly greater for intensity discrimination, but there was no significant difference between ears for frequency discrimination. Results provide further evidence that dichotic presentation is not essential for the demonstration of ear asymmetry. Under the proper conditions, the contralateral connections of the ears and cerebral hemispheres appear sufficiently strong to dominate other pathways even in the absence of competing stimuli. (French summary) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Age-related changes in temporal resolution: Envelope and intensity effects.

Gap-detection thresholds were determined for 10 younger and 10 older adults (mean age 23 yrs and 68 yrs, respectively) at 2 sensation levels (40 and 60 dB SL) for tone pips with Gaussian amplitude envelopes whose standard deviations were 0.5, 1, 1.5, and 2 msec. Gap-detection thresholds were larger for the older participants under all conditions. For all participants, gap-detection thresholds increased with the standard deviation of the Gaussian amplitude envelope, were relatively independent of sensation level, and were independent of the degree of hearing loss. Because spectral splatter decreases with increasing standard deviation of the Gaussian amplitude envelope, the age-related differences in gap detection cannot be attributed to differences between how young and old listeners are affected by off-frequency cues. Furthermore, the consistent age difference in gap detection at all amplitude envelope standard deviations was shown to be incompatible with the hypothesis that temporal integration time is longer for older listeners. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Inter-individual differences in binaural detection of low-frequency or high-frequency tonal signals masked by narrow-band or broadband noise

Detection thresholds for either 500-Hz tones or 4-kHz tones were measured for a group of 19 listeners utilizing the interaural configurations NoSo and NoS pi. Both broadband (100-8500 Hz) noises and narrow-band (50-Hz-wide) noises served as maskers. In addition, direct measures of the listeners' sensitivities to changes in interaural temporal differences (ITDs) and interaural intensitive differences (IIDs) were measured using 400-Hz-wide noises centered at 500 Hz or 4 kHz. A rather large range of inter-individual differences in threshold was observed for 4-kHz tonal signals masked by narrow-band noise in the NoS pi configuration. This result is consistent with several sets of data from our previous experiments conducted over more than a decade. A broad range of thresholds was also obtained for 500-Hz tonal signals masked by narrow-band noise in the NoS pi configuration. This outcome, coupled with the fact that the use of a broadband masker did not yield a large distribution of thresholds for the detection of a 500-Hz tone masked by a broad band of noise, suggests that it is the use of a narrow-band masker, per se, that results in a large range of thresholds. Statistical analyses revealed that thresholds in the NoS pi detection tasks were not highly correlated with thresholds measured in the ITD- and the IID-discrimination tasks. Nevertheless, the five listeners who were the most sensitive in the narrow-band NoS pi detection and the five listeners who were the least sensitive in the narrow-band NoS pi detection tasks were those who were the most and least sensitive, respectively, to changes in ITDs and to changes in IIDs.