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Individual differences in auditory capabilities. I
Abstract
Twenty-eight audiometrically normal adult listeners were given a variety of auditory tests, ranging from quiet and masked thresholds through the discrimination of simple and moderately complex temporal patterns. Test-retest reliability was good. Individual differences persisted on a variety of psychoacoustic tasks following a period of training using adaptive threshold-tracking methods, and with trial-by-trial feedback. Large individual differences in performance on temporal-sequence-discrimination tasks suggest that this form of temporal processing may be of clinical significance. In addition, high correlations were obtained within given classes of tests (as, between all tests of frequency discrimination) and between certain classes of tests (as, between tests of frequency discrimination and those of sequence discrimination). Patterns of individual differences were found which support the conclusion that individual differences in auditory performance are, in part, a function of patterns of independent abilities.
... Regarding thresholds of intensity irrespective of onset anisochrony/asynchrony, it has been found, for sinusoid tones, that intensity discrimination is generally dependent not on signal frequency but on sensation level or perceived loudness of stimuli presentation. The louder the presentation level, the lower the JND of intensity of a given tone (Jesteadt et al., 1977;Johnson et al., 1987). At louder presentation levels of 70-80 dB (which are not uncommon in live music performance contexts), typical reported JNDs tended to be around 0.4-0.8 ...
... Regarding intensity, however, it would seem that the group-trend significant differences between timing styles found for the drums (snare and hi-hat) and bass would likely be evident (that is, perceptually softer/louder) according to an absolute 0.4-0.8 dB JND range for a 70-80 dB stimuli presentation level (Johnson et al., 1987;Jesteadt et al., 1977)-a level not uncommon in liveperformed groove-music contexts. For the drummers, the average laid-back snare strokes were played with greater intensity than pushed strokes, with values above the lower JND range (+0.41 dB), whereas average differences in hi-hat stroke total SPL between the laid-back and on-the-beat conditions (+0.76 dB), as well as the pushed and on-the-beat conditions (+0.79 dB), were just above the lower range value and just shy of the higher range value. ...
... Regarding JNDs of intensity, several studies have found that intensity discrimination of sinusoid tones is not, in fact, dependent on signal frequency but rather on sensation level or perceived loudness of stimuli presentation, whereby the louder the presentation level, the lower the JND of intensity of a given tone (Elliot et al., 1966;Jesteadt et al., 1977;Johnson et al., 1987). At louder presentation levels of 70-80 dB (not uncommon in live music performance contexts), typical reported JNDs tend to fall around 0.4-0.8 ...
This thesis investigates the expressive means through which musicians well versed in groove-based music shape the timing of a rhythmic event, with a focus on the interaction between produced timing and sound features. In three performance experiments with guitarists, bassists, and drummers, I tested whether musicians systematically manipulate acoustic factors such as duration, intensity, and volume when they want to play with a specific microrhythmic style (pushed, on-the-beat, or laid-back). The results show that all three groups of instrumentalists indeed played pushed, on-the-beat, or laid-back relative to the reference pulse and in line with the instructed microrhythmic styles, and that there were systematic and consequential sound differences. Guitarists played backbeats with a longer duration and darker sound in relation to pushed and laid-back strokes. Bassists played pushed beats with higher intensity than on-the-beat and laid-back strokes. For the drummers, we uncovered different timing–sound combinations, including the use of longer duration (snare drum) and higher intensity (snare drum and hi-hat), to distinguish both laid-back and pushed from on-the-beat strokes. The metronome as a reference pulse led to less marked timing profiles than the use of instruments as a reference, and it led in general to earlier onset positions as well, which can perhaps be related to the phenomenon of “negative mean asynchrony.” We also conducted an in-depth study of the individual drummers’ onset and intensity profiles using hierarchical cluster analyses and phylogenetic tree visualizations and uncovered a diverse range of strategies. The results support the research hypothesis that both temporal and sound-related properties contribute to how we perceive the location of a rhythmic event in time. I discuss these results in light of theories and findings from other studies of the perception and performance of groove, as well as research into rhythm and microrhythmic phenomena such as perceptual centers and onset asynchrony/anisochrony.
... Although research has shown that healthy people can extract information from characteristics in sound (Castiello et al. 2010), such as an object's size (Lakatos et al. 1997) or material (Wildes and Richards 1988), they do not perceive sound similarly due to their physiological and psychological differences. Based on Johnson et al. (1987), who found that patterns of individual differences identified in healthy adults similarly affected their auditory performance, we expected participants would most likely perceive, interpret, and possibly use artificial sounds based on their movement on an individual basis, if at all. Therefore, as a way of maximising the potential for participants to engage with and become influenced by sound, our goal was to develop and combine methods for mapping club head speed to parameters controlling sound synthesis and study their effects on performance. ...
... It is possible that participants found it easier to use sounds generated by the whoosh synthesiser when club head speed was mapped onto a more limited scale. Based on the findings made in Johnson et al. (1987), we anticipated that participants would perceive and interpret the 24 different types of sonification differently, which, in turn, might affect performance. As demonstrated in the Supplementary Materials, the timbral differences between synthesisers and modulations are considerable; while, the scales and mapping functions are purposefully more abstract and, depending on their combination, possibly less obvious to listeners. ...
... Our zone estimation error standard deviation results showed that only the whoosh synthesiser proved to be significantly different from both static pink noise and jet; whereas, no other synthesis parameter affected performance. Interestingly, this synthesiser produced sounds with a more limited frequency spectrum, and it is possible that participants found them easier to interpret and read their movements as embedded in the sound Johnson et al. (1987) and Kidd et al. (2007). Bieńkiewicz et al. (2019) developed a similar synthesiser for their golf putting study, which reported novice participants exposed to sound improved motor learning. ...
This study investigates whether real-time auditory feedback has a direct behavioural or perceptual effect on novices performing a golf putting task with limited visual feedback. Due to its significant role in the success of a putt, club head speed was selected as the parameter for sonification. Different combinations of synthesisers, timbral modulations, scales, and mappings were developed to examine whether particular sound classes influenced performance. When compared to trials with static pink noise, we found that, despite their vision being limited at impact, participants were able to use different types of sonification to significantly reduce variability in their distance from the target and ball location estimation. These results suggest that concurrent sound can play an important role in reducing variability in behavioural performance and related perceptual estimations. In addition, we found that, when compared to trials with static pink noise, participants were able to use sonification to significantly lower their average impact velocity. In the discussion, we offer some trends and observations relative to the different sound synthesis parameters and their effects on behavioural and perceptual performance.
... We also tested individuals' perceptual abilities in three control conditions: (1) a non-linguistic, non-musical test of psychophysical pitch discrimination threshold, designed to control for basic sensory acuity in pitch discrimination; (2) a test of temporal frequency discrimination, designed to control for basic (non-pitch) auditory perceptual acuity; and (3) a test of visual spatial frequency discrimination, designed to control for individual differences in attention and motivation. Previous work has demonstrated a variety of relationships among individual differences in both low-level auditory abilities and domain-general cognitive factors [e.g., 23,[41][42][43][44][45][46]. As such, positive correlations can reasonably be expected among all five conditions, both experimental and control [47,48]; however, it is the pattern of the relative strengths of these correlations that will be most informative about the relationship between pitch perception in music and language. ...
... Although we excluded auditory acuity for pitch (tones), non-pitch auditory acuity (clicks) and general attention and motivation for psychophysical tasks (gabors), there may exist other factors that contribute to the remaining shared variance between language and music. For example, although previous studies have not found relationships between indices of higher-level cognitive processes (such as IQ or working memory) and lower-level auditory perception [44], it may be the case that these psychometric factors bear on linguistic and musical pitch processing after sensory acuity is controlled [42]. Additionally, it is worth pointing out that both the linguistic and musical conditions involved contour pitches, whereas all three control conditions involved pairs of singleton stimulus tokensas such, individual differences in working memory capacity and sequencing ability may have been differentially implicated in these tasks. ...
Language and music epitomize the complex representational and computational capacities of the human mind. Strikingly similar in their structural and expressive features, a longstanding question is whether the perceptual and cognitive mechanisms underlying these abilities are shared or distinct - either from each other or from other mental processes. One prominent feature shared between language and music is signal encoding using pitch, conveying pragmatics and semantics in language and melody in music. We investigated how pitch processing is shared between language and music by measuring consistency in individual differences in pitch perception across language, music, and three control conditions intended to assess basic sensory and domain-general cognitive processes. Individuals' pitch perception abilities in language and music were most strongly related, even after accounting for performance in all control conditions. These results provide behavioral evidence, based on patterns of individual differences, that is consistent with the hypothesis that cognitive mechanisms for pitch processing may be shared between language and music.
... For both the younger and the older listeners, auditory sensitivity (i.e., pure tone average) was uncorrelated with performance on the temporal order tasks, suggesting that central auditory mechanisms may be implicated, as is thought to be the case for speech comprehension difficulties in the elderly (Marshall, 1981;Working Group, 1988). The large individual differences obtained for both age groups are in accord with previous evidence of individual differences on temporal sequencing tasks (Johnson,Watson, & Jensen, 1987). Other auditory temporal abilities, such as temporal acuity, have revealed considerably smaller individual differences (Johnson et al., 1987) as well as stronger relations to peripheral auditory functioning (seeScharf & Buus, 1986, for a review). ...
... The large individual differences obtained for both age groups are in accord with previous evidence of individual differences on temporal sequencing tasks (Johnson,Watson, & Jensen, 1987). Other auditory temporal abilities, such as temporal acuity, have revealed considerably smaller individual differences (Johnson et al., 1987) as well as stronger relations to peripheral auditory functioning (seeScharf & Buus, 1986, for a review). The observed deficits in temporal sequencing may be related to the speech comprehension difficulties that are experienced by many elderly persons. ...
In a series of experiments, we examined age-related differences in adults' ability to order sequences of tones presented at various speeds and in contexts designed to promote or to impede stream segregation. In Experiment 1, 32 listeners (16 young, 16 old) were required to identify two repeating sequences that consisted of four tones (two from a high and two from a low frequency range) in different order. In Experiment 2, 32 listeners were required to judge whether the two recycled patterns from Experiment 1 were the same or different. In Experiment 3, four young and four old listeners were tested on the tasks of Experiment 2 over an extended period. In Experiment 4, 16 young and 16 old listeners were tested with sequences that were not recycled and were composed of tones drawn from a narrow frequency range. Elderly adults were less able than young adults to distinguish between tone sequences with contrasting order, regardless of the speed of presentation, the nature of the task (identification vs. same/different), the amount of practice, the frequency separation of the tones, or the presence or absence of recycling. These findings provide evidence of a temporal sequencing impairment in elderly listeners but reveal no indication of age differences in streaming processes.
... Results were considerably variable across listeners (for example, see Fig. 3; for raw data, see Supplementary Fig. 2). Variability in naïve NH listeners has been documented on a variety of psychophysical tasks [257][258][259], though not with this specific psychophysical paradigm or that used in Experiment 1 [233,235,246,252]. It is possible that the task difficulty contributed to variability across listeners. ...
Bilateral cochlear implants (BiCIs) result in several benefits, including improvements in speech understanding in noise and sound source localization. However, the amount of benefit received by each patient varies considerably. One reason for this variability is difference between the two ears’ hearing function, i.e., interaural asymmetry. Thus far, investigations of interaural asymmetry have been highly specialized within various topic areas. The goal of this dissertation is to provide a new framework under which these studies can be integrated synergistically. This framework begins with a binaural signal, ends with a behavioral response, and consists of two interim stages: encoding and decoding of binaural information. Encoding of binaural cues is represented using excitation-inhibition (EI) of signals from the left ear and right ear according to where the signal originated in space. Decoding of binaural cues is represented using predictive coding, which assumes that expectations based on prior sensory experience and transmitted via top-down connections are compared against sensory input (i.e., bottom-up connections). This new framework can be applied to physiological, behavioral, and modeling studies, resulting in a clearer understanding of the implications of interaural asymmetry and improved strategies for optimizing patient interventions.
... In order to evaluate perspeaker, per-interlocutor, and per-conversation patterns in convergence as reflected across characteristics, we grouped together all six characteristics in a single model (they were already z-transformed, to facilitate comparison). Previous studies have found replicable individual differences in various perceptual tasks (e.g., Ishida et al., 2016;Johnson, Watson, & Jensen, 1987;Kong & Edwards, 2016), and some work has found that personal traits such as AQ and social desirability scores (Natale, 1975) are predictive of degree of convergence, but studies on individual differences in convergence have rarely used retesting to establish individual consistency in convergence. Individual tendencies in convergence may exist but be outweighed by larger effects such as the nature of each particular conversation or the speaker's opinion of the interlocutor. ...
Are there individual tendencies in convergence, such that some speakers consistently converge more than others? Similarly, are there natural "leaders," speakers with whom others converge more? Are such tendencies consistent across different linguistic characteristics? We use the Switchboard Corpus to perform a large-scale convergence study of speakers in multiple conversations with different interlocutors, across six linguistic characteristics. Because each speaker participated in several conversations, it is possible to look for individual differences in speakers' likelihood of converging and interlocutors' likelihood of eliciting convergence. We only find evidence for individual differences by interlocutor, not by speaker: There are natural leaders of convergence, who elicit more convergence than others across characteristics and across conversations. The lack of similar evidence for speakers who converge more than others suggests that social factors have a stronger effect in mediating convergence than putative individual tendencies in producing convergence, or that such tendencies are characteristic-specific.
... Auditory processing ability, as measured using tests which assess the discrimination of individual acoustic dimensions, has been shown to widely vary among L1 learners (Johnson, Watson, & Jensen, 1987;Surprenant & Watson, 2001;Kidd, Watson & Gygi, 2007), and has been strongly tied to L1 learning difficulty (Casini, Pech-Georgel, & Ziegler, 2018;Goswami et al., 2011), literacy development (Gibson, Hogben, & Fletcher, 2006;White-Schwoch et al., 2015; but see Georgiou, Protopapas, Papadopoulos, Skaloumbakas, & Parrila, 2010;Halliday & Bishop, 2006), and aging processes (Ruggles, Bharadwaj, & Shinn-Cunningham, 2012;Schneider, Daneman, & Pichora-Fuller2002;Wilson et al., 2002). As a result, the diagnosis of auditory processing has been proposed as a biomarker to identify appropriate treatments for abnormal language development, as suggested for autism spectrum disorders (Russo et al., 2008(Russo et al., , 2009) and dyslexia (Hornickel & Kraus, 2013). ...
In this study, we propose a hypothesis that domain-general auditory processing, a perceptual anchor of L1 acquisition, can serve as the foundation of successful post-pubertal L2 learning. This hypothesis was tested with 139 post-pubertal L2 immersion learners by linking individual differences in auditory discrimination across multiple acoustic dimensions to the segmental, prosodic, lexical, and morphosyntactic dimensions of L2 proficiency. Overall, auditory processing was a primary determinant of a range of participants' proficiency scores, even after biographical factors (experience, age) were controlled for. The link between audition and proficiency was especially clear for L2 learners who had passed beyond the initial phase of immersion (length of residence > 1 year). The findings suggest that greater auditory processing skill benefits post-pubertal L2 learners immersed in naturalistic settings for a sufficient period of time by allowing them to better utilize received input, which results in greater language gains and leads to more advanced L2 proficiency in the long run (similar to L1 acquisition).
... Our second goal was to develop an online sonification method that maps performance errors in ways that modulated the auditory guidance signal. Although it is known that healthy humans do not perceive sound similarly due to their physiological and psychological differences, a study by Johnson, Watson, and Jensen (1987) found patterns identified in healthy participants affected auditory performance similarly. Based on these findings, we decided to develop different methods for modulating the auditory guidance signal in real-time, so as to maximize the opportunity for participants to perceive and use sonification based on errors of performance. ...
Purpose: To study whether novices can use sonification to enhance golf putting performance and swing movements. Method: Forty participants first performed a series of 2 m and 4 m putts, where swing velocities associated with successful trials were used to calculate their mean velocity profile (MVP). Participants were then divided into four groups with different auditory conditions: static pink noise unrelated to movement, auditory guidance based on personalized MVP, and two sonification strategies that mapped the real-time error between observed and MVP swings to modulate either the stereo display or roughness of the auditory guidance signal. Participants then performed a series of 2 m and 4 m putts with the auditory condition designated to their group. Results: In general our results showed significant correlations between swing movement variability and putting performance for all sonification groups. More specifically, in comparison to the group exposed to static pink noise, participants who were presented auditory guidance significantly reduced the deviation from their average swing movement. In addition, participants exposed to error-based sonification with stereo display modulation significantly lowered their variability in timing swing movements. These results provide further evidence of the benefits of sonification for novices performing complex motor skill tasks. Conclusions: More importantly, our findings suggest participants were able to better use online error-based sonification rather than auditory guidance to reduce variability in the execution and timing of their movements.
... Regarding JNDs of intensity, several studies have found that intensity discrimination of sinusoid tones is not, in fact, dependent on signal frequency but rather on sensation level or perceived loudness of stimuli presentation, whereby the louder the presentation level, the lower the JND of intensity of a given tone (Elliot et al., 1966;Jesteadt et al., 1977;Johnson et al., 1987). At louder presentation levels of 70-80 dB (not uncommon in live music performance contexts), typical reported JNDs tend to fall around 0.4-0.8 ...
This paper reports on two experiments that investigated the expressive means through which musicians well versed in groove-based music signal the intended timing of a rhythmic event. Data were collected from 21 expert electric guitarists and 21 bassists, who were instructed to perform a simple rhythmic pattern in three different timing styles—“laid-back,” “on-the-beat,” and “pushed”—in tandem with a metronome. As expected, onset and peak timing locations corresponded to the instructed timing styles for both instruments. Regarding sound, results for guitarists revealed systematic differences across participants in the duration and brightness [spectral centroid (SC)] of the guitar strokes played using these different timing styles. In general, laid-back strokes were played with a longer duration and a lower SC relative to on-the-beat and pushed strokes. Results for the bassists indicated systematic differences in intensity (sound-pressure level): pushed strokes were played with higher intensity than on-the-beat and laid-back strokes. These results lend further credence to the hypothesis that both temporal and sound-related features are important indications of the intended timing of a rhythmic event, and together these features offer deeper insight into the ways in which musicians communicate at the microrhythmic level in groove-based music.
... Results were considerably variable across listeners (for example, see Fig. 3; for raw data, see Supplementary Fig. 2 1 ). Variability in naive NH listeners has been documented on a variety of psychophysical tasks (Johnson et al., 1986; Lutfi and Liu, 2007), though not with this specific psychophysical paradigm or that used in Experiment 1 (F€ ullgrabe and Lorenzi, 2003;Grant et al., 1998;Lee, 1994;Lema naska et al., 2002). It is possible that the task difficulty contributed to variability across listeners. ...
Separating sound sources in acoustic environments relies on making ongoing, highly accurate spectro-temporal comparisons. However, listeners with hearing impairment may have varying quality of temporal encoding within or across ears, which may limit the listeners' ability to make spectro-temporal comparisons between places-of-stimulation. In this study in normal hearing listeners, depth of amplitude modulation (AM) for sinusoidally amplitude modulated (SAM) tones was manipulated in an effort to reduce the coding of periodicity in the auditory nerve. The ability to judge differences in AM rates was studied for stimuli presented to different cochlear places-of-stimulation, within- or across-ears. It was hypothesized that if temporal encoding was poorer for one tone in a pair, then sensitivity to differences in AM rate of the pair would decrease. Results indicated that when the depth of AM was reduced from 50% to 20% for one SAM tone in a pair, sensitivity to differences in AM rate decreased. Sensitivity was greatest for AM rates near 90 Hz and depended upon the places-of-stimulation being compared. These results suggest that degraded temporal representations in the auditory nerve for one place-of-stimulation could lead to deficits comparing that temporal information with other places-of-stimulation.
... However, other research has documented strong individual differences in the performance of various temporalsequence-discrimination tasks (Johnson et al., 1987;Kidd et al., 2007). This raises the possibility that high-performers in tone-scramble tasks differ from low-performers solely in being able to extract scale-generated qualities from these rapid, musically degenerate stimuli. ...
A tone-scramble is a random sequence of pure tones. Previous studies have found that most listeners (≈ 70%) perform near chance in classifying rapid tone-scrambles composed of multiple copies of notes in G-major vs G-minor triads; the remaining listeners perform nearly perfectly [Chubb, Dickson, Dean, Fagan, Mann, Wright, Guan, Silva, Gregersen, and Kowalski (2013). J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 134(4), 3067-3078; Dean and Chubb (2017). J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 142(3), 1432-1440]. This study tested whether low-performing listeners might improve with slower stimuli. In separate tasks, stimuli were tone-scrambles presented at 115, 231, 462, and 923 notes per min. In each task, the listener classified (with feedback) stimuli as major vs minor. Listeners who performed poorly in any of these tasks performed poorly in all of them. Strikingly, performance was worst in the task with the slowest stimuli. In all tasks, most listeners were biased to respond “major” (“minor”) if the stimulus ended on a note high (low) in pitch. Dean and Chubb introduced the name “scale-sensitivity” for the cognitive resource that separates high- from low-performing listeners in tone-scramble classification tasks, suggesting that this resource confers sensitivity to the full gamut of qualities that music can attain by being in a scale. In ruling out the possibility that performance in these tasks depends on speed of presentation, the current results bolster this interpretation.
... One unavoidable conclusion to be drawn from decades of research on hearing is that real differences remain after training in the ability of listeners to perform complex auditory tasks ( Humes et al., 2013;Johnson et al., 1986;Kidd et al., 2007;Lutfi and Liu, 2007). Nowhere is this more evident than in studies of 'cocktail-party listening'-a metaphor for everyday listening where multiple sound sources compete for one's attention ( Cherry, 1953). ...
A simulated ‘cocktail-party’ listening experiment was conducted to determine the relative role of decision weights and internal noise in accounting for the large individual differences in performance typically observed in these experiments. The listener heard over headphones interleaved sequences of random vowels and were asked to judge on each trial whether the vowels were spoken by the same AAA or different ABA talkers. The A and B vowels had nominally different Fo and spatial position (simulated using KEMAR HRTFs), but were randomly perturbed around these values on each presentation. Decision weights for each dimension, internal noise, and efficiency measures were estimated using COSS analysis [Berg (1990). J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 88:149-158]. Decision weights differed across listeners, but weighting efficiency was quite similar. Individual differences in performance accuracy ranging over 40 percentage points were largely related to differences in internal noise. The results are discussed in terms of their implications for the relative role of sensory and attentional factors affecting individual performance differences in simulated cocktail party listening.
... Previous work has assessed individual differences on a variety of psychoacoustical tasks within both normal-hearing and hearing-impaired populations to reveal potential underlying coding mechanisms (e.g., Plomp, 1981, 1983;Johnson et al., 1987;Watson et al., 1996;Kidd et al., 2007;McDermott et al., 2010). Our experiment used a similar paradigm, involving 100 young normal-hearing listeners. ...
The question of how frequency is coded in the peripheral auditory system remains unresolved. Previous research has suggested that slow rates of frequency modulation (FM) of a low carrier frequency may be coded via phase-locked temporal information in the auditory nerve, whereas FM at higher rates and/or high carrier frequencies may be coded via a rate-place (tonotopic) code. This hypothesis was tested in a cohort of 100 young normal-hearing listeners by comparing individual sensitivity to slow-rate (1-Hz) and fast-rate (20-Hz) FM at a carrier frequency of 500 Hz with independent measures of phase-locking (using dynamic interaural time difference, ITD, discrimination), level coding (using amplitude modulation, AM, detection), and frequency selectivity (using forward-masking patterns). All FM and AM thresholds were highly correlated with each other. However, no evidence was obtained for stronger correlations between measures thought to reflect phase-locking (e.g., slow-rate FM and ITD sensitivity), or between measures thought to reflect tonotopic coding (fast-rate FM and forward-masking patterns). The results suggest that either psychoacoustic performance in young normal-hearing listeners is not limited by peripheral coding, or that similar peripheral mechanisms limit both high- and low-rate FM coding.
... This result could be interpreted as indicating that the auditory processes underlying FM and AM detection are at least somewhat independent and mature at different rates. This perspective is consistent with the argument that individual differences in auditory performance in adults reflect multiple distinct auditory abilities (Johnson, Watson, & Jensen, 1987). ...
Purpose:
The factors affecting frequency discrimination in school-age children are poorly understood. The goal of the present study was to evaluate developmental effects related to memory for pitch and the utilization of temporal fine structure.
Method:
Listeners were 5.1- to 13.6-year-olds and adults, all with normal hearing. A subgroup of children had musical training. The task was a 3-alternative forced choice in which listeners identified the interval with the higher frequency tone or the tone characterized by frequency modulation (FM). The standard was 500 or 5000 Hz, and the FM rate was either 2 or 20 Hz.
Results:
Thresholds tended to be higher for younger children than for older children and adults for all conditions, although this age effect was smaller for FM detection than for pure-tone frequency discrimination. Neither standard frequency nor modulation rate affected the child/adult difference FM thresholds. Children with musical training performed better than their peers on pure-tone frequency discrimination at 500 Hz.
Conclusions:
Testing frequency discrimination using a low-rate FM detection task may minimize effects related to cognitive factors like memory for pitch or training effects. Maturation of frequency discrimination does not appear to differ across conditions in which listeners are hypothesized to rely on temporal cues and place cues.
... The listeners varied substantially in both psychoacoustic measurements and artifact detection but none were highly sensitive in all areas measured, leading to Shlien and Soulodre's conclusion that a universally sensitive "golden ear" listener may not exist. Johnson, Watson and Jensen (1987) reported significant differences among "normal" listeners in discrimination of intensity, frequency, and tone and gap duration; for the sake of example, a few of their summary results are shown in Table 2. They noted that some listeners may perform at an approximately average level on most tests but be well above or below average on a few abilities. ...
Multidimensional scaling techniques can be used to convert perceptions of (dis)similarity to psychological maps, by treating (dis)similarity ratings as ordinal scale distance estimates. In this study, listeners were asked to rate the dissimilarity of pairs of compressed versions of instrumental music phrases on two occasions separated by approximately one year, and the recovered psychological maps were compared to assess their stability over time. Results indicate that such maps derived from multidimensional scaling analyses are not necessarily more similar within a listener over time than between listeners.
... Furthermore, direct measurement of the human response to these factors is difficult, since it is hard for people to quantify their response to a particular signal near threshold in a repeatable and consistent fashion. It is not unusual for a series of psychoacoustic measurements to extend over many days for a single listener in order to obtain a comprehensive characterization of that listener's auditory system [3]. As such, a rigorous approach is not practical for a large population and thus one of the goals of the present study was to investigate alternative measurement techniques. ...
Subjective listening tests of digital audio codecs rely on a panel of expert listeners. Experience has shown that members of the listening panel vary in their sensitivities to the various types of coding artifacts. The paper describes the development of psychoacoustic techniques designed to characterize these listeners in order to predict their sensitivities to audio reproduction defects. Results of subjective tests show that expert listeners typically have enhanced sensitivity to one or more particular classes of coding artifact.
... If this L1/L2 " trade-off " is extended to adult L2 learners, individuals with relatively poorly defined L1 categories (shallower identification slopes, better within-category discrimination) might prove to be better at learning L2 vowels. Similarly, research in auditory abilities has shown that listeners vary in their performance on psychoacoustic tasks (Johnson et al., 1987; Surprenant and Watson, 2001; Kidd et al., 2007; see also Carroll, 1993 for a comprehensive review of factor-analytic studies of human cognitive abilities , based on 38 studies published before 1993); it is possible that this may impact their learning of new distinctions ( " auditory processing " hypothesis). Wong and Perrachione (2007) and Lee et al. (2007) showed that auditory pitch ability , as measured using nonspeech stimuli, can predict success in the use of pitch patterns in lexical identification in a tone language by L2 learners; however, since pitch is a shared acoustic feature of music and tone perception, one may question whether such a link is specific to the acquisition of tone languages or may relate to general L2 learning ability. ...
The perception and production of nonnative phones in second language (L2) learners can be improved via auditory training, but L2 learning is often characterized by large differences in performance across individuals. This study examined whether success in learning L2 vowels, via five sessions of high-variability phonetic training, related to the learners' native (L1) vowel processing ability or their frequency discrimination acuity. A group of native speakers of Greek received training, while another completed the pre-/post-tests but without training. Pre-/post-tests assessed different aspects of their L2 and L1 vowel processing and frequency acuity. L2 and L1 vowel processing were assessed via: (a) Natural English (L2) vowel identification in quiet and in multi-talker babble, and natural Greek (L1) vowel identification in babble; (b) the categorization of synthetic English and Greek vowel continua; and (c) discrimination of the same continua. Frequency discrimination acuity was assessed for a nonspeech continuum. Frequency discrimination acuity was related to measures of both L1 and L2 vowel processing, a finding that favors an auditory processing over a speech-specific explanation for individual variability in L2 vowel learning. The most efficient frequency discriminators at pre-test were also the most accurate both in English vowel perception and production after training.
... Broadbent, 1958;Moray, 1969aMoray, , 1969bStyles, 1997;Pashler, 1998), and those other papers that have looked at factors*or 'auditory abilities'*derived from statistical analysis of the results of many auditory tests on large groups of listeners but did not include cognition (e.g. Divenyi & Haupt, 1997a, 1997b, 1997cJerger & Chmiel, 1997;Johnson et al, 1987). 1 It is clear from Table 1 that a wide variety of cognitive tests have been used. They can be classified into these approximate groups: ...
This paper summarizes twenty studies, published since 1989, that have measured experimentally the relationship between speech recognition in noise and some aspect of cognition, using statistical techniques such as correlation or factor analysis. The results demonstrate that there is a link, but it is secondary to the predictive effects of hearing loss, and it is somewhat mixed across study. No one cognitive test always gave a significant result, but measures of working memory (especially reading span) were mostly effective, whereas measures of general ability, such as IQ, were mostly ineffective. Some of the studies included aided listening, and two reported the benefits from aided listening: again mixed results were found, and in some circumstances cognition was a useful predictor of hearing-aid benefit.
... All speech materials were presented at a level of 75 dB SPL as determined by the level of the unfiltered calibration tone or noise (for the reverberation-processed materials) generated in an NBS-9A coupler. The TBAC is a battery of eight tests of auditory processing developed from a large-scale analysis of a much broader range of auditory processing tasks (Johnson, Watson, & Jensen, 1987). All the tests are administered in the same fashion through use of the standard two-alternative forcedchoice paradigm. ...
This study examined the performance of four subject groups on several temporally based measures of auditory processing and several measures of speech identification. The four subjects groups were (a) young normal-hearing adults; (b)-hearing-impaired elderly subjects ranging in age from 65 to 75 years; (c) hearing-impaired elderly adults ranging in age from 76 to 86 years; and (d) young normal-hearing listeners with hearing loss simulated with a spectrally shaped masking noise adjusted to match the actual hearing loss of the two elderly groups. In addition to between-group analyses of performance on the auditory processing and speech identification tasks, correlational and regression analyses within the two groups of elderly hearing-impaired listeners were performed. The results revealed that the threshold elevation accompanying sensorineural hearing loss was the primary factor affecting the speech identification performance of the hearing-impaired elderly subjects both as groups and as individuals. However, significant increases in the proportion of speech identification score variance accounted for were obtained in the elderly subjects by including various measures of auditory processing.
... Vowels are labeled along the abscissa and are ordered in ascending value of formant frequency. vidual differences reported by Johnson et al. (1987) for a variety of nonspeech stimuli. Although previous studies of formant-frequency discrimination (see Table I) have not attended to individual subject differences, thresholds differing by a factor of 2 across subjects can be seen in Mermelstein's (1978) data tables and standard deviations are quite high for a few thresholds reported by Gagne and Zurek (1988). ...
Thresholds for formant-frequency discrimination were obtained for ten synthetic English vowels patterned after a female talker. To estimate the resolution of the auditory system for these stimuli, thresholds were measured using well-trained subjects under minimal-stimulus-uncertainty procedures. Thresholds were estimated for both increments and decrements in formant frequency for the first and second formants. Reliable measurements of threshold were obtained for most formants tested, the exceptions occurring when a harmonic of the fundamental was aligned with the center frequency of the test formant. In these cases, unusually high thresholds were obtained from some subjects and asymmetrical thresholds were measured for increments versus decrements in formant frequency. Excluding those cases, thresholds for formant frequency, delta F, are best described as a piecewise-linear function of frequency which is constant at about 14 Hz in the F1 frequency region (< 800 Hz), and increases linearly in the F2 region. In the F2 region, the resolution for formant frequency is approximately 1.5%. The present thresholds are similar to previous estimates in the F1 region, but about a factor of three lower than those in the F2 region. Comparisons of these results to those for pure tones and for complex, nonspeech stimuli are discussed.
... In some cases, as in individual differences in the ability to hear out the details of complex auditory patterns, the range of thresholds in discrimination performance can be as large as or even larger than the effects of the primary relevant stimulus parameters (e.g. Johnson et al 1987;Watson 1987, p. 272). Many reports of large individual differences in the discrimination or detection abilities of audiometrically normal listeners have come from studies of temporal masking (e.g. ...
In this review of auditory psychophysics and perception, we cite some important books, research monographs, and research summaries from the past decade. Within auditory psychophysics, we have singled out some topics of current importance: Cross-Spectral Processing, Timbre and Pitch, and Methodological Developments. Complex sounds and complex listening tasks have been the subject of new studies in auditory perception. We review especially work that concerns auditory pattern perception, with emphasis on temporal aspects of the patterns and on patterns that do not depend on the cognitive structures often involved in the perception of speech and music. Finally, we comment on some aspects of individual difference that are sufficiently important to question the goal of characterizing auditory properties of the typical, average, adult listener. Among the important factors that give rise to these individual differences are those involved in selective processing and attention.
... These individual differences are remarkably large (D. M. Johnson, Watson, & Jensen, 1987) and are probably the cause of the slightly unstable data. ...
The proportion-of-the-total-duration rule (Kidd & Watson, 1992) states that the detectability of a change in a component of a tonal sequence can be predicted by the proportional duration of the changed component relative to the length of the sequence as a whole. A similar viewpoint relies on temporal distinctiveness to account for primacy, recency, and other serial position effects in memory (Murdock, 1960; Neath, 1993a, 1993b). Such distinctiveness models predict that an item will be remembered if it is more distinctive along some dimension relative to possible competitors. Three experiments explored the relation between distinctiveness and proportional duration by examining the effects of the proportion of the total duration of a tone in a sequence, serial position, and interstimulus interval (ISI) on the detection of a change in one component of a tonal sequence. Experiment 1 replicated the basic effect with relatively untrained subjects and a fixed frequency difference. Experiment 2 showed that distinctiveness holds for tonal sequences and a same/different task. Experiment 3 combined the two to show that proportional duration, ISI, and position of the changed tone all contribute to discrimination performance. The present research combines theories that have been proposed in the psychophysics and memory fields and suggests that a comprehensive principle based on relative distinctiveness may be able to account for both perceptual and memory effects.
... It has been known for some time that individuals exhibit a large range of performance on a wide variety of auditory psychophysical tasks Johnson et al., 1987. These differences become more apparent in the study of complex sounds, especially those with more temporal and spectral complexity. ...
While a large portion of the variance among listeners in speech recognition is associated with the audibility of components of the speech waveform, it is not possible to predict individual differences in the accuracy of speech processing strictly from the audiogram. This has suggested that some of the variance may be associated with individual differences in spectral or temporal resolving power, or acuity. Psychoacoustic measures of spectral-temporal acuity with nonspeech stimuli have been shown, however, to correlate only weakly (or not at all) with speech processing. In a replication and extension of an earlier study [Watson et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. Suppl. 1 71. S73 (1982)] 93 normal-hearing college students were tested on speech perception tasks (nonsense syllables, words, and sentences in a noise background) and on six spectral-temporal discrimination tasks using simple and complex nonspeech sounds. Factor analysis showed that the abilities that explain performance on the nonspeech tasks are quite distinct from those that account for performance on the speech tasks. Performance was significantly correlated among speech tasks and among nonspeech tasks. Either, (a) auditory spectral-temporal acuity for nonspeech sounds is orthogonal to speech processing abilities, or (b) the appropriate tasks or types of nonspeech stimuli that challenge the abilities required for speech recognition have yet to be identified.
Over six decades ago, Cherry (1953) drew attention to what he called the “cocktail-party problem”; the challenge of segregating the speech of one talker from others speaking at the same time. The problem has been actively researched ever since but for all this time one observation has eluded explanation. It is the wide variation in performance of individual listeners. That variation was replicated here for four major experimental factors known to impact performance: differences in task (talker segregation vs. identification), differences in the voice features of talkers (pitch vs. location), differences in the voice similarity and uncertainty of talkers (informational masking), and the presence or absence of linguistic cues. The effect of these factors on the segregation of naturally spoken sentences and synthesized vowels was largely eliminated in psychometric functions relating the performance of individual listeners to that of an ideal observer, d′ ideal . The effect of listeners remained as differences in the slopes of the functions (fixed effect) with little within-listener variability in the estimates of slope (random effect). The results make a case for considering the listener a factor in multitalker segregation and identification equal in status to any major experimental variable.
Listeners differ widely in the ability to follow the speech of a single talker in a noisy crowd—what is called the cocktail-party effect. Differences may arise for any one or a combination of factors associated with auditory sensitivity, selective attention, working memory, and decision making required for effective listening. The present study attempts to narrow the possibilities by grouping explanations into model classes based on model predictions for the types of errors that distinguish better from poorer performing listeners in a vowel segregation and talker identification task. Two model classes are considered: those for which the errors are predictably tied to the voice variation of talkers (decision weight models) and those for which the errors occur largely independently of this variation (internal noise models). Regression analyses of trial-by-trial responses, for different tasks and task demands, show overwhelmingly that the latter type of error is responsible for the performance differences among listeners. The results are inconsistent with models that attribute the performance differences to differences in the reliance listeners place on relevant voice features in this decision. The results are consistent instead with models for which largely stimulus-independent, stochastic processes cause information loss at different stages of auditory processing.
Le son 3D appartient aux nouvelles technologies en cours d’introduction dans les équipements de tête des pilotes d’aéronefs militaires, destinées à faciliter l’interface homme-système. La technologie son 3D vise à restituer sous casque les indices acoustiques utilisés par le système auditif pour localiser une source sonore dans l’espace. L’intérêt de cette technologie est de redonner à l’opérateur le plein usage de ses facultés auditives.En pratique, spatialiser les informations sonores optimise leurs traitements tout en épargnant la charge cognitive du sujet grâce à l’intuitivité de la perception auditive. Ainsi, en restituant la direction et la distance de sources sonores virtuelles, le son 3D favorise la détection et l’interprétation des alarmes mais aussi l’intelligibilité et la gestion des communications radio.Après un rappel sur les indices physiques permettant la localisation auditive, la technologie son 3D ainsi que ses applications sont présentées. Les questions importantes que soulèvent les différences individuelles dans la perception spatiale des sources sonores sont ensuite décrites. Face à ces différences individuelles, la solution d’un apprentissage perceptif spécifique est analysée. Enfin, les pertes auditives ayant une fréquence particulière parmi le personnel naviguant, leur impact sur la perception sonore spatiale est discuté.
Among listeners with normal pure-tone sensitivity there is considerable variation in spectral and temporal discrimination abilities, as measured with nonspeech sounds. However, contrary to theories that associate deficits in auditory processing with degraded speech perception, individual differences in a battery of measures of spectral-temporal acuity for non-speech sounds have little or no relation to individual differences in speech recognition under difficult listening conditions. Based on data collected with groups of over 500 college students and 465 first-graders, individual differences in speech processing are dependent on neither basic auditory discrimination abilities, as measured with a wide variety of non-speech test stimuli, nor on general cognitive abilities, as reflected in IQ and SAT test scores, or college grades. In a related finding, speech-recognition skills among young children are not predictive of their academic achievement, including reading, in the first two years of elementary school. Other cognitive and intellectual abilities do, however, predict the academic accomplishments of the same children. It is proposed that speech recognition largely depends on two cross-modality mechanisms: an ability to recognize linguistic messages on the basis of fragmented information, presumably by the use of contextual and linguistic constraints, and a general ability to recognize familiar patterns.
This study examined the performance of four subject groups on several temporally based measures of auditory processing and several measures of speech identification. The four subject groups were (a) young normal-hearing adults; (b) hearing-impaired elderly subjects ranging in age from 65 to 75 years; (c) hearing-impaired elderly adults ranging in age from 76 to 86 years; and (d) young normal-hearing listeners with hearing loss simulated with a spectrally shaped masking noise adjusted to match the actual hearing loss of the two elderly groups. In addition to between-group analyses of performance on the auditory processing and speech identification tasks, correlational and regression analyses within the two groups of elderly hearing-impaired listeners were performed. The results revealed that the threshold elevation accompanying sensorineural hearing loss was the primary factor affecting the speech identification performance of the hearing-impaired elderly subjects both as groups and as individuals. However, significant increases in the proportion of speech identification score variance accounted for were obtained in the elderly subjects by including various measures of auditory processing.
Acute insulin-induced hypoglycaemia impairs performance on tests of general mental ability in humans. It is recognized that different brain functions vary in their sensitivity to neuroglycopenia, but little is known about the effects of neuroglycopenia on specific brain processes. The effect of controlled hypoglycaemia on two aspects of auditory information processing (auditory temporal processing and simple auditory processing) was examined in a homogeneous group of 20 healthy non-diabetic human subjects. Auditory temporal processing (temporal order discrimination) and simple auditory processing (pitch discrimination, single-tone duration and single-tone loudness discrimination) tests were part of the Test of Basic Auditory Capabilities (TBAC). Two tests of general cognitive performance (Digit Symbol Substitution and Trail Making B) were included to provide a measure of general brain functioning during hypoglycaemia. Hypoglycaemia lead to a significant deterioration in auditory temporal processing (P < 0.01), and a deterioration in one of three tasks of simple auditory processing (discrimination of single-tone loudness, P < 0.05). Significant disruptions also occurred in both tests of general brain functioning. These results are congruent with other studies in human subjects, showing a disruptive effect of hypoglycaemia on visual information processing when examined under conditions of limited perceptual time, and they provide further evidence of the importance of sensory processing speed in basic perceptual and cognitive functions. The disruptive effect of moderate insulin-induced hypoglycaemia on auditory perception may have implications for insulin-treated diabetic humans exposed to this metabolic stress, because of the importance of hearing in everyday life.
While the literature stresses the importance of expert panels and of training in evaluating sound-quality attributes, the abilities of experts have typically only been investigated for a very limited range of tasks (e.g. naming timbral qualities). It is therefore the aim of this study to develop a battery of tests covering a larger range of auditory capabilities in order to assess individual listeners. The format of all tests is kept as 'objective' as possible by using a three-alternative forced-choice paradigm in which the subject must choose which of the sound samples is different, thus keeping the instruction to the subjects simple and common for all tests. Both basic (e.g. frequency discrimination) and complex (e.g. profile analysis) psychoacoustic tests are covered in the battery and a threshold of discrimination or detection is obtained for each test. Data were collected on 24 listeners who had been recruited for participation in an expert listening panel for evaluating the sound quality of hi-fi audio systems. The test battery data were related to the actual performance of the listeners when judging the degradation in quality produced by audio codecs.
Intensity (loudness), frequency (pitch), and duration discrimination were examined in 41 normal-hearing children, aged 4 to 6 years, and 9 adults. A second study retested 25 of the youngest children 12 to 18 months later. Intensity discrimination showed the least improvement with age and was adultlike by age 5 for most of the children. In contrast, frequency and duration discrimination showed highly significant improvement with age, hut remained poorer than adults' discrimination for many 6-year-olds. Large individual differences were observed within alt tasks and age groups.
Prosodic attributes of speech, such as intonation, influence our ability to recognize, comprehend, and produce affect, as well as semantic and pragmatic meaning, in vocal utterances. The present study examines associations between auditory perceptual abilities and the perception of prosody, both pragmatic and affective. This association has not been previously examined. Ninety-seven participants (49 female and 48 male participants) with normal hearing thresholds took part in two experiments, involving both prosody recognition and psychoacoustic tasks. The prosody recognition tasks included a vocal emotion recognition task and a focus perception task requiring recognition of an accented word in a spoken sentence. The psychoacoustic tasks included a task requiring pitch discrimination and three tasks also requiring pitch direction (i.e., high/low, rising/falling, changing/steady pitch). Results demonstrate that psychoacoustic thresholds can predict 31% and 38% of affective and pragmatic prosody recognition scores, respectively. Psychoacoustic tasks requiring pitch direction recognition were the only significant predictors of prosody recognition scores. These findings contribute to a better understanding of the mechanisms underlying prosody recognition and may have an impact on the assessment and rehabilitation of individuals suffering from deficient prosodic perception.
Some listeners are especially sensitive to minute codec quantization noise. Various psycho-acoustic tests were performed in order to measure the characteristics of these listeners. Though the auditory filter bandwidths of these listeners appeared to be normal, some had unusual abilities to detect weak signals buried in noise.
Various metrics are used to evaluate different aspects of speech communication. Most popular are measures of speech intelligibility. Other metrics that measure more than intelligibility are being employed, but they are not well known or readily available to potential users. This report contains reviews of some current practices and new research on metrics used to quantify speech communication. Three areas of speech communication are reported. The first reviews the development of speech intelligibility measures, the American National Standards Institute, S3.2-1989, 'Method for the Measurement of Intelligibility of Speech over Communication Systems,' and the proposed revision of the Articulation Index. The second addresses relationships between speech intelligibility and task performance showing that the complexity of both the speech an f the task affects performance. Some procedures allow determination of the amount bf intelligibility required to complete specific tasks. The third area addresses the roles of multiple modalities in speech perception, primarily the auditory and visual, in areas of integration models, generalizability theory, tests of basic discrimination abilities, and sequence comparison measurement techniques. Additional information of these topics is available from the individual researchers.
A series of auditory tests (over 20 variables) were performed on two groups of normal- hearing listeners, for a total of 107 persons, 61 men and 46 women, whose ages ranged from 14 to 50 with a majority between 20 and 25. The variables tested were absolute and masked detection thresholds, and discrimination thresholds.The first goal of this study was to get an estimate of the normal distribution of auditory capabilities for intensity, frequency, time and space perception. From a statistical analysis of our results, a "Psychoacoustic Profile" can be defined (plot of the auditory performance in terms of Z-scores, as a function of the variables tested), for each individual or for groups of individuals, based on a limited set of variables, that might prove to be a useful tool for some professional applications.The long-term scientific goal of this investigation is to build a simplified model for auditory perception, through a multidimensional representation of the individual. In this model, the main features of auditory perception would be represented by independent vectors, and each individual by his components relative to these vectors, leading to some sort of auditory ID. In this study, a Principal Component Analysis of our data is used as a first approach, the first factors of which are taken as the independent vectors that we are looking for, and the variables that have the highest correlation with these factors are used to measure individual components.
The sensory abnormalities associated with disorders such as dyslexia, autism and schizophrenia have often been attributed to a generalized deficit in the visual magnocellular-dorsal stream and its auditory homologue. To probe magnocellular function, various psychophysical tasks are often employed that require the processing of rapidly changing stimuli. But is performance on these several tasks supported by a common substrate? To answer this question, we tested a cohort of 1060 individuals on four 'magnocellular tasks': detection of low-spatial-frequency gratings reversing in contrast at a high temporal frequency (so-called frequency-doubled gratings); detection of pulsed low-spatial-frequency gratings on a steady luminance pedestal; detection of coherent motion; and auditory discrimination of temporal order. Although all tasks showed test-retest reliability, only one pair shared more than 4 per cent of variance. Correlations within the set of 'magnocellular tasks' were similar to the correlations between those tasks and a 'non-magnocellular task', and there was little consistency between 'magnocellular deficit' groups comprising individuals with the lowest sensitivity for each task. Our results suggest that different 'magnocellular tasks' reflect different sources of variance, and thus are not general measures of 'magnocellular function'.
In a series of experiments, we examined age-related differences in adults’ ability to order sequences of tones presented at
various speeds and in contexts designed to promote or to impede stream segregation. In Experiment 1, 32 listeners (16 young,
16 old) were required to identify two repeating sequences that consisted of four tones (two from a high and two from a low
frequency range) in different order. In Experiment 2, 32 listeners were required to judge whether the two recycled patterns
from Experiment 1 were the same or different. In Experiment 3, four young and four old listeners were tested on the tasks
of Experiment 2 over an extended period. In Experiment 4, 16 young and 16 old listeners were tested with sequences that were
not recycled and were composed of tones drawn from a narrow frequency range. Elderly adults were less able than young adults
to distinguish between tone sequences with contrasting order, regardless of the speed of presentation, the nature of the task
(identification vs. same/different), the amount of practice, the frequency separation of the tones, or the presence or absence
of recycling. These findings provide evidence of a temporal sequencing impairment in elderly listeners but reveal no indication
of age differences in streaming processes.
Speed and fidelity of basic information processing and fluid intelligence deteriorate with age, while crystallized intelligence remains stable. There is also evidence that indices of basic information processing correlate with fluid intelligence in a college population. We hypothesized that age-related changes in simple auditory information processing may explain a significant proportion of age-related decline in fluid, but not crystallized intelligence. To test this hypothesis, we obtained two-tone frequency discrimination thresholds as well as scores on fluid and crystallized intelligence tests in a group of healthy adults spanning ages from 18 to 83. We then compared linear models specifying the relations among those measures. The model postulating age effects on fluid intelligence mediated by differences in frequency discrimination fitted the data better than the model restricted to direct effects of age in fluid intelligence. No effects of information-processing index or age on crystallized intelligence were observed.
Abstract: This dissertation investigates whether there are systematic individual differences in the perceptual weighting of frequency and duration speech cues for vowels and fricatives (and their non-speech analogues) among a dialectally homogeneous group of speakers. Many of the previous studies on individual differences have failed to control for the dialects of the subjects, which suggests that any individual differences that were found may be dialectal. Dialect production and perception tasks were included in this study to help ensure that subjects are not from dissimilar dialects. The main task for listeners was AX discrimination for four separate types of stimuli: sine wave vowels, narrowband fricatives, synthetic vowels, and synthetic fricatives. Vowel stimuli were based on the manipulation of duration and frequency of F1 for the vowels in "heed" and "hid", while fricative stimuli were based on the manipulation of the fifth frequency centroid of the fricatives in "bath" and "bass". Multidimensional scaling results indicate that there are subgroups within a dialect that attend to frequency and duration differently, and that not all listeners use these cues consistently across dissimilar phones. Results of this study will be relevant to the fields of perception, feature phonology, dialectology, and language change. If subgroups can have different perceptions of speech (but similar productions), this questions what is needed to classify dialect continua, and the ratios of these subgroups changing over time can explain some language mergers and shifts. Title from first page of PDF file. Document formatted into pages; contains xxii, 320 p.; also includes graphics. Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2003. Includes bibliographical references (p. 303-320). System requirements: World Wide Web browser and PDF viewer.
The perception of temporal and timbric changes in stressed vowels has been investigated by means of the matched-guise technique. Students of three different Tuscan towns were presented with orally produced sentences in two different speech conditions (read and semispontaneous speech). They had to make a decision about the speaker’s town – “Florence”, “Leghorn”, “Pisa”. Thus, we combined perceptual dialectology together with acoustic phonetics by using vocal synthesis techniques; this research extends in an original way the investigation of Tuscan listeners’ abilities, by taking advantage of the available data in the acoustic domain. We considered the asymmetric stressed vowel system – i.e. the velarization of /a/ and the general lowering of the stressed mid-low vowels – in the varieties of Leghorn and Pisa. The acoustic features involved are not restricted to the lowering of F1 of the vowels mentioned above: a longer duration and a more extensive f0 modulation are also present. These phenomena are a sort of shibboleth for Tuscan people, as they represent a social marker, signalling group and geographical identity. In the read speech condition, students seem to be more sensitive to frequential changes with respect to temporal changes. In the semispontaneous speech condition the longest vowels are almost always perceived as being uttered by a Leghorn speaker. Both in the read and in the semispontaneous speech condition the vowel // seems to be more easy to label from a geographic point of view with respect to //.
This study examined some psychometric properties of the Test of Basic Auditory Capabilities (TBAC). Two experiments are described that evaluate the psychometric functions and the test-retest reliability of the tests comprising the TBAC. The psychometric functions were established for young listeners with normal hearing and the test-retest reliability was evaluated both with young listeners with normal hearing and elderly listeners with hearing impairment. Results indicate that maximum scores on the TBAC are reached at presentation levels of at least 65-75 dB SPL. In addition, the reliability analyses indicate that the TBAC is a reliable measure for both young listeners with normal hearing and elderly listeners with hearing impairment when at least one practice test is given.
Recent research has suggested that deficits in several metalinguistic/phonological abilities, such as short-term verbal memory and phoneme segmentation, may be etiologic factors in specific reading disability, and it has been speculated that these weaknesses may result from a more fundamental deficit in the processing of temporal, auditory stimuli. This study examined the auditory temporal processing skills of reading-disabled, math-disabled, and normally achieving college students. The math-disabled group was included to control for the possibility that poor temporal processing is a "marker" variable for learning disability rather than being related specifically to reading disability. Subjects were assessed on a battery of psychophysical tasks that included five tests of temporal processing. The reading-disabled group performed significantly more poorly on the temporal tasks but performed as well as the other groups on the simple pitch and loudness discrimination tasks. In spite of the significant difference on the temporal tasks, the majority of reading-disabled subjects performed within the same range as the subjects in the other two groups, and there were also some normally reading subjects who performed poorly on the temporal processing tasks. These findings suggest that poor temporal processing is neither a necessary nor a sufficient cause of reading disability, but that there is a modest association between the two domains.
Some of the earliest scientific attempts to understand the nature of intelligence investigated differences in sensory discrimination and reaction time. There is once again interest in the relations between such simple abilities and intelligence, partly as a result of the application of information-processing paradigms to the study of intelligence. Correlations in the range of .3 to .8 have been reported between psychometric measures of intelligence and performance on simple cognitive, sensory, and motor tasks. The current study reports correlations between scores on a battery of auditory discrimination tasks and measures of intelligence and academic aptitude in two samples of college students. The correlations between the intellectual and academic aptitude measures and the total percent correct on the auditory battery ranged from 45 to 59. These results are consistent with recent findings of significant relationships between simple sensory, cognitive, and motor abilities and psychometric intelligence as well as with much earlier reports by Spearman (1904) and others of relationships between pitch discrimination and intelligence. An implication of these findings is that intelligence is a potential confounding variable in studies of the auditory perceptual abilities of various clinical populations.
A battery of tests for the evaluation of temporal (forward masking) and spectral (detection of frequency change; critical band for masking; psychoacoustic tuning curve) resolution in hearing with regard to the importance for speech recognition in noise has been applied to two groups of subjects. One group of 10 listeners had normal hearing, while the other consisted of 11 subjects with moderate, sloping sensorineural hearing loss. Significant differences were found between the two groups in all parameters except critical bandwidth for masking. Correlation analysis on the test results from the combined groups of subjects showed that speech recognition in noise was best correlated with the average hearing threshold levels at 2 and 4 kHz, followed by forward masking and psychoacoustic tuning curves at 4 kHz. The correlation coefficients were approximately 0.7, 0.6 and 0.55, respectively. Detection of frequency change and critical bandwidth show the lowest correlations to speech recognition in noise.
Individual differences were examined for 49 listeners in a simultaneous-masking task with random-frequency, multicomponent maskers and a 1000-Hz signal. Across conditions, the maskers were broadband noise or complexes of 2-100 sinusoids whose frequencies were randomly chosen with each presentation. Maskers were equal rms waveforms, presented at 60 dB SPL. Thresholds for the multicomponent maskers spanned a range of up to 59 dB across listeners within conditions without distinct groupings. When divided into quartiles, mean thresholds for listeners in the lowest quartile increased monotonically with the number of masker components and peaked below values produced by broadband noise. Listeners in the upper quartile had nonmonotonic functions with a broad peak around 10-20 components, with values above those produced by broadband noise. Quiet thresholds and masked thresholds for the broadband-noise masker did not distinguish "high-" from "low-threshold" groups. Lowering masker uncertainty (frequencies randomized between but not within trials) or introducing temporal differences by shortening the signal both improved performance by as much as 40 dB, dependent on the masking produced with maximum uncertainty. Training effects within experiment (excluding an initial training period) were examined for all listeners and for five listeners across two consecutive experiments. Eleven of forty-nine listeners (22%) showed systematic improvement averaging 12 dB within experiment, independent of high or low original thresholds. For the five tested longer, four improved by 5 dB or more in at least one condition, but the change in performance occurred primarily during initial training for the second experiment. The large individual differences documented present a challenge to the development of models for masking produced by masker-frequency uncertainty.
Previously published data for 49 normal-hearing, young adult listeners in a simultaneous-masking task with high stimulus uncertainty were reexamined with regard to possible differences in performance for male versus female listeners. The task was the detection of a 1000-Hz, sinusoidal signal in the presence of multitonal simultaneous maskers comprised of sinusoids whose frequencies were drawn at random from a wide range with each stimulus presentation. The analysis focused on the ten-component masking condition, which included all listeners and showed large individual differences in performance. The average quiet threshold for the signal was near 6 dB SPL for both the 27 males and 22 females, but average masked threshold was 7-8 dB higher for females. More females than males were represented in the highest quartile or upper half of the performance range ('high threshold'), with more males than females in the lowest quartile or half ('low threshold'). Particularly for tasks exhibiting large individual differences, more attention should be paid to the possibility of sex differences in performance.
We determined the degree of overlap in required processing resources between simultaneously performed non-verbal auditory and visual pattern-recognition tasks. In experiment 1, concurrent presentation of binary auditory frequency pattern sequences interfered with recognition memory of both binary auditory sound pressure level and binary color sequences, but the amount of interference was greater with auditory-level patterns. In experiment 2, mutual interference was demonstrated between auditory level and visual color pattern sequences. We conclude that dual-task performance using auditory and visual pattern-recognition tasks is limited by modality-specific perceptual factors and by modality-independent cognitive factors not specific to a single sensory modality. It is concluded that poor performance on a single pattern-recognition task cannot be associated in a one-to-one fashion with a single perceptual ability or process.
The rationale to evaluate for central auditory processing disorder (CAPD) in school-aged children is based on the assumption that an auditory-specific perceptual deficit underlies many learning problems including specific reading and language disabilities. A fundamental issue in this area is whether convincing empirical evidence exists to validate this proposition. Herein, we consider the issue of modality specificity by examining the extent to which reading, language, and attention disorders in school-aged children involve perceptual dysfunctions limited to a single sensory modality. Difficulty in validating CAPD as a diagnostic label is due in large part to use of the unimodal inclusive framework, which has biased the diagnosis to favor sensitivity of test results over documenting the specificity of the deficit. Indeed, empirical research documenting modality-specific auditory-perceptual dysfunction in this population is scarce. Therefore, the existing literature on this topic has not clarified the "true" nature of the problem, and has left many questions about this disorder unanswered. It is argued that demonstrating modality specificity is one way to rule out supramodal disorders as explanations for observed dysfunction. Multimodal perceptual testing is one logical approach to help clarify this area of investigation.
This investigation examined the abilities of younger and older listeners to discriminate and identify temporal order of sounds presented in tonal sequences. It was hypothesized that older listeners would exhibit greater difficulty than younger listeners on both temporal processing tasks, particularly for complex stimulus patterns. It was also anticipated that tone order discrimination would be easier than tone order identification for all listeners. Listeners were younger and older adults with either normal hearing or mild-to-moderate sensorineural hearing losses. Stimuli were temporally contiguous three-tone sequences within a 1/3 octave frequency range centered at 4000 Hz. For the discrimination task, listeners discerned differences between standard and comparison stimulus sequences that varied in tonal temporal order. For the identification task, listeners identified tone order of a single sequence using labels of relative pitch. Older listeners performed more poorly than younger listeners on the discrimination task for the more complex pitch patterns and on the identification task for faster stimulus presentation rates. The results also showed that order discrimination is easier than order identification for all listeners. The effects of hearing loss on the ordering tasks were minimal.
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