Onset asynchrony is an important cue for auditory scene analysis. For example, a harmonic of a vowel that begins before the other components contributes less to the perceived phonetic quality. This effect was thought primarily to involve high-level grouping processes, because the contribution can be partly restored by accompanying the leading…

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…

An Auditory Ambiguity Test (AAT) was taken twice by nonmusicians, musical amateurs, and professional musicians. The AAT comprised different tone pairs, presented in both within-pair orders, in which overtone spectra rising in pitch were associated with missing fundamental frequencies (F0) falling in pitch, and vice versa. The F0 interval ranged…

The present study investigated the perception and production of English /w/ and /v/ by native speakers of Sinhala, German, and Dutch, with the aim of examining how their native language phonetic processing affected the acquisition of these phonemes. Subjects performed a battery of tests that assessed their identification accuracy for natural…

The authors conducted 4 experiments to test the decision-bound, prototype, and distribution theories for the categorization of sounds. They used as stimuli sounds varying in either resonance frequency or duration. They created different experimental conditions by varying the variance and overlap of 2 stimulus distributions used in a training phase…

In 3 experiments, the authors tested performance in simple tone matching and classification tasks. Each tone was defined on location and frequency dimensions. In the first 2 experiments, participants completed a same-different matching task on the basis of one of these dimensions while attempting to ignore irrelevant variation in the other…