The precise structure of speech sound representations is still a matter of debate. In the present neurobiological study, we compared predictions about differential sensitivity to speech contrasts between models that assume full specification of all phonological information in the mental lexicon with those assuming sparse representations (only…

Four visual-world experiments, in which listeners heard spoken words and saw printed words, compared an optimal-perception account with the theory of phonological underspecification. This theory argues that default phonological features are not specified in the mental lexicon, leading to asymmetric lexical matching: Mismatching input…

Sensory saltation is a spatiotemporal illusion in which the judged positions of stimuli are shifted toward subsequent stimuli that follow closely in time. So far, studies on saltation in the auditory domain have usually employed subjective rating techniques, making it difficult to exactly quantify the extent of saltation. In this study, temporal…

The musical priming paradigm has shown facilitated processing for tonally related over less-related targets. However, the congruence between tonal relatedness and the psychoacoustical properties of music challenges cognitive interpretations of the involved processes. Our goal was to show that cognitive expectations (based on listeners' tonal…

Psychophysical studies are reported examining how the context of recent auditory stimulation may modulate the processing of new sounds. The question posed is how recent tone stimulation may affect ongoing performance in a discrimination task. In the task, two complex sounds occurred in successive intervals. A single target component of one complex…

Three picture-word interference (PWI) experiments assessed the extent to which embedded subset words are activated during the identification of spoken superset words (e.g., "bone" in "trombone"). Participants named aloud pictures (e.g., "brain") while spoken distractors were presented. In the critical condition,…

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…

Many models of spoken word recognition posit the existence of lexical and sublexical representations, with excitatory and inhibitory mechanisms used to affect the activation levels of such representations. Bottom-up evidence provides excitatory input, and inhibition from phonetically similar representations leads to lexical competition. In such a…

A model was proposed as an alternative to current models for categorical perception, which refers to the apparent responding to stimuli only in absolute terms. The model proposed that a single (common) factor causes both a peak in the discrimination function and a categorical dichotomy and thus the correlation between the two. (Editor/RK)

Three experiments studied the perception of tone sequences. Ratings of perceived structure and ease of recognition in transposition were both influenced by harmonic progression, the contour, and the excursion or repetition pattern within the sequence. Results are described in terms of the abstraction and analysis of levels of pitch relations.…

A uniprocessor, unidimensional model, based on Krueger's noisy-operator theory, was fitted satisfactorily to data from four published studies of tone comparison. The model predicts faster response time on different judgments because of heterogeneity of difference. (Author/CP)