Room Reflections and Constancy in Speech-Like Sounds: Within-Band Effects

Abstract

The experiment asks whether constancy in hearing precedes or follows grouping. Listeners heard speech-like sounds comprising eight auditory-filter shaped noise-bands that had temporal envelopes corresponding to those arising in these filters when a speech message is played. The “context” words in the message were “next you’ll get _to click on,” into which a “sir” or “stir” test word was inserted. These test words were from an 11-step continuum that was formed by amplitude modulation. Listeners identified the test words appropriately and quite consistently, even though they had the “robotic” quality typical of this type of 8-band speech. The speech-like effect of these sounds appears to be a consequence of auditory grouping. Constancy was assessed by comparing the influence of room reflections on the test word across conditions in which the context had either the same level of reflections, or where it had a much lower level. Constancy effects were obtained with these 8-band sounds, but only in “matched” conditions, where the reflections’ level was varied in the same bands in the context and test word. In “mismatched” conditions, no constancy effects were found. It would appear that this type of constancy in hearing precedes the across-channel grouping whose effects are so apparent in these sounds. This result is discussed in terms of the ubiquity of grouping across different levels of representation.