| Popis: |
Perception of an auditory continuum can be changed by a preceding visual context [Norrix and Green, in Proc. AVSP’99, Santa Cruz, CA, August, 1999]. This study asked whether this perceptual shift requires that listeners experience the stimuli as speech. A sine‐wave continuum (/ara–ala/) was presented to three groups of trained participants for identification (auditory‐only condition). Tokens from the continuum were also paired with a point‐light display of a talker saying /aba/ (auditory–visual condition) and presented to the same listeners for identification. Observers in group one (speech) identified the sounds as containing an /r/ or /l/ and reported after the experiment that they heard the sounds as speech. Group two, also instructed to identify the speech sounds as containing /r/ or /l/, reported they did not hear the sounds as speech. Group three (nonspeech) was instructed to identify the environmental sounds as most similar to the ‘‘first’’ or ‘‘last’’ sound of the continuum. Results indicated a reliable shift for the auditory–visual compared to the auditory‐only identification function only in the speech group, suggesting that auditory–visual context effects might depend on observers interpreting the stimuli as speech. [Work supported by NSF Grant ♯SBR9809013 awarded to Kerry P. Green (deceased).] |
