Primary auditory stream segregation and perception of order in rapid sequences of tones.

A recent finding of the inability of listeners to judge the order of three or four nonspeech sounds presented in a repetitive cycle is explained by the concept of stream segregation. Two experiments showed that at high presention rates of a short cycle of six tones (three high and three low), 5s invariably segregated the tone sequences into streams based on frequency and could perceive only those patterns relating elements of the same subjective stream.