Identification and discrimination of rise time: Is it categorical or noncategorical?

Kewley‐Port, Diane; Pisoni, David B.

doi:10.1121/1.390766

Cited by 8 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…The rapidly-changing cue was analogous to amplitude rise time, which plays a role in distinctions between classes of consonants ͑Van Tasell et al, 1987͒, for example, the stop-glide contrast ͑e.g., /b/-/w/; Mack and Blumstein, 1983;Walsh and Diehl, 1991͒. This cue also has been investigated in the context of the nonspeech pluck-bow distinction ͑Cutting, 1982; Kewley-Port and Pisoni, 1984͒. Each stimulus was composed of a 300-ms burst of white noise ͑10-kHz sample rate͒ with two 200-Hz bands of energy removed by 50-dB elliptic bandstop filters. This filtering process created two spectral notches characterized by their center frequencies.…”

Section: A Stimulus Spacementioning

confidence: 99%

Categorization and discrimination of nonspeech sounds: Differences between steady-state and rapidly-changing acoustic cues

Mirman

Holt

McClelland

2004

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

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Different patterns of performance across vowels and consonants in tests of categorization and discrimination indicate that vowels tend to be perceived more continuously, or less categorically, than consonants. The present experiments examined whether analogous differences in perception would arise in nonspeech sounds that share critical transient acoustic cues of consonants and steady-state spectral cues of simplified synthetic vowels. Listeners were trained to categorize novel nonspeech sounds varying along a continuum defined by a steady-state cue, a rapidly-changing cue, or both cues. Listeners' categorization of stimuli varying on the rapidly changing cue showed a sharp category boundary and posttraining discrimination was well predicted from the assumption of categorical perception. Listeners more accurately discriminated but less accurately categorized steady-state nonspeech stimuli. When listeners categorized stimuli defined by both rapidly-changing and steady-state cues, discrimination performance was accurate and the categorization function exhibited a sharp boundary. These data are similar to those found in experiments with dynamic vowels, which are defined by both steady-state and rapidly-changing acoustic cues. A general account for the speech and nonspeech patterns is proposed based on the supposition that the perceptual trace of rapidly-changing sounds decays faster than the trace of steady-state sounds.

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Section: A Stimulus Spacementioning

confidence: 99%

Categorization and discrimination of nonspeech sounds: Differences between steady-state and rapidly-changing acoustic cues

Mirman

Holt

McClelland

2004

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

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“…For stimuli having the intended onset durations, discrimination performance decreased monotonically with increasing onset duration (Rosen and Howell, 1981, 1983). Other investigators also questioned the categorical perception of the onset-duration continuum and suggested that the ability to discriminate or match onset durations rather follows Weber's law (Tenney, 1962; Pollack, 1963; van Heuven and van den Broecke, 1979; Hary and Massaro, 1982; van den Broecke and van Heuven, 1983; Kewley-Port and Pisoni, 1984; Smurzyński, 1985; Smurzyński and Houtsma, 1989), which states that the Weber fraction is constant.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, Weber fractions are approximately constant over only a limited range of onset durations. Below this range, they consistently increase with decreasing onset duration (Tenney, 1962; Pollack, 1963; van Heuven and van den Broecke, 1979; van den Broecke and van Heuven, 1983; Kewley-Port and Pisoni, 1984). Moreover, Weber fractions may decrease with training (Smurzyński and Houtsma, 1989), and they depend on stimulus level.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Onset-Duration Matching of Acoustic Stimuli Revisited: Conventional Arithmetic vs. Proposed Geometric Measures of Accuracy and Precision

Friedrich

Heil

2017

Front. Psychol.

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Onsets of acoustic stimuli are salient transients and are relevant in humans for the perception of music and speech. Previous studies of onset-duration discrimination and matching focused on whether onsets are perceived categorically. In this study, we address two issues. First, we revisit onset-duration matching and measure, for 79 conditions, how accurately and precisely human listeners can adjust the onset duration of a comparison stimulus to subjectively match that of a standard stimulus. Second, we explore measures for quantifying performance in this and other matching tasks. The conventional measures of accuracy and precision are defined by arithmetic descriptive statistics and the Euclidean distance function on the real numbers. We propose novel measures based on geometric descriptive statistics and the log-ratio distance function, the Euclidean distance function on the positive-real numbers. Only these properly account for the fact that the magnitude of onset durations, like the magnitudes of most physical quantities, can attain only positive real values. The conventional (arithmetic) measures possess a convexity bias that yields errors that grow with the width of the distribution of matches. This convexity bias leads to misrepresentations of the constant error and could even imply the existence of perceptual illusions where none exist. This is not so for the proposed (geometric) measures. We collected up to 68 matches from a given listener for each condition (about 34,000 matches in total) and examined inter-listener variability and the effects of onset duration, plateau duration, sound level, carrier, and restriction of the range of adjustable comparison stimuli on measures of accuracy and precision. Results obtained with the conventional measures generally agree with those reported in the literature. The variance across listeners is highly heterogeneous for the conventional measures but is homogeneous for the proposed measures. Furthermore, the proposed measures show that listeners tend to under- rather than to overestimate the onset duration of the comparison stimuli. They further reveal effects of the stimulus carrier on accuracy and precision which are missed by the conventional measures. Our results have broad implications for psychophysical studies that use arithmetic measures to quantify performance when geometric measures should instead be used.

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“…According to Kewley-Port and Pisoni (1984), the Weber fraction calculated as dRT/RT (rise time) for the sawtooth stimuli was 0.8 for RT = 10 msec, 0.4 for RT = 20 msec, and around 0.2 for rise times in the 30-60 msec range. This means that lO-msec step increases of the rise time should be discriminated.…”

Section: Subjectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Hary and Massaro (1982) argued that categorical perception was questionable for both speech and nonspeech continua. Results of a study conducted by Kewley-Port and Pisoni (1984) appeared to follow Weber's law, which is the opposite of categorical perception.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Noncategorical identification of rise time

Smurzyński¹

1985

Perception & Psychophysics

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Identification and discrimination of rise time: Is it categorical or noncategorical?

Cited by 8 publications

References 25 publications

Categorization and discrimination of nonspeech sounds: Differences between steady-state and rapidly-changing acoustic cues

Categorization and discrimination of nonspeech sounds: Differences between steady-state and rapidly-changing acoustic cues

Onset-Duration Matching of Acoustic Stimuli Revisited: Conventional Arithmetic vs. Proposed Geometric Measures of Accuracy and Precision

Noncategorical identification of rise time

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