Children 5 and 9 years of age and adults were required to identify the final words of low- and high-context sentences in background noise. Age-related differences in the audibility of speech signals were minimized by selecting signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) that yielded 78% correct performance for low-context sentences. As expected, children required more favorable SNRs than adults to achieve co...

A synesthetic metaphor (e.g., sweet touch) is a metaphor that results from a combination of a modifier and a head, where both express different perceptual qualities. Most of the existing studies examine how the acceptability of synesthetic metaphors can be explained by the pairing of adjective modifier’s and head noun’s modalities. However, little attention has been given to cognitive effects e...

In this paper, the impression of various kinds of auditory signals currently used in automobiles and a comprehensive evaluation were measured by a semantic differential method. The desirable acoustic characteristic was examined for each type of auditory signal. Sharp sounds with dominant high-frequency components were not suitable for auditory signals in automobiles. This trend is expedient for...

Although we know much about familiar faces or objects that we temporarily cannot name, what do we know about familiar odors that we cannot name? Two experiments here examined this issue, by comparing the reliability of responses to various questions using 2 tests, with odors that were consistently named or given similar or very different names on each test occasion. Reliability estimates for va...

This paper aims to highlight the differences between men and women regarding impression formation. It is based on secondary analysis of the data gathered in two previous experiments with similar conditions. However, the hypotheses formulated within this study have not been tested before. The current analysis was conducted on 86 participants, 47 males and 39 females. Their ages ranged between 15...

In recent years, researchers have become interested in the way that the affective quality of contextual information transfers to a perceived target. We therefore examined the effect of a red (vs. green, mixed red/green, and achromatic) background - known to be valenced - on the processing of stimuli that play a key role in human interactions, namely facial expressions. We also examined whether ...