An essential step in understanding the processes underlying the general mechanism of perceptual categorization is to identify which portions of a physical stimulation modulate the behavior of our perceptual system. More specifically, in the context of speech comprehension, it is still a major open challenge to understand which information is used to categorize a speech stimulus as one phoneme o...

Auditory spectral integration in the perception of dynamic acoustic cues in speech was examined experimentally. The potential role of a dynamically changing center of gravity in the perception of diphthongs /ui/ (as in we) and /iu/ (as n you) was verified. Listeners identified the effective frequency changes well, showing that movement of the spectral center of gravity can provide the cues nece...

This article overviews some recent advances in our understanding of temporal processes in auditory perception. It begins with the premise that hearing is the online perceptual elaboration of acoustic events distributed in time. It examines studies of gap detection for two reasons: first, to probe the temporal acuity of auditory perception in its own right and, second, to show how studies of gap...

The asymmetric sampling in time (AST) hypothesis developed here provides a framework for understanding a range of psychophysical and neuropsychological data on speech perception in the context of a revised cortical functional anatomic model. The AST model is motivated by observations from psychophysics and cognitive neuroscience that speak to the fractionation of auditory processing, in general...

Music is a curious example of a temporally patterned acoustic stimulus, and a compelling pan-cultural phenomenon. This review strives to bring some insights from decades of music psychology and sensorimotor synchronization (SMS) literature into the mainstream auditory domain, arguing that musical rhythm perception is shaped in important ways by temporal processing mechanisms in the brain. The f...

Auditory learning, an improvement of sound detection or discrimination with practice, has been used to study basic mechanisms of perceptual processing (Gibson, 1967; Goldstone, 1998; Hawkey et al., 2004) and as a tool for enhancing language skills (Tallal et al., 1996; Clopper and Pisoni, 2004; Moore et al., 2005b). It has relevance to speech perception in both these domains. Speech consists (E...

In this paper we present a novel artificial auditory system for humanoid robots. We address the problem of estimating an articulatory representation of the speech of the talker who is speaking to the robot using our auditory system. According to the motor theory of perception, the articulatory representation is the first step of a robust speech understanding process. The system is composed by t...

Perceptual categories and boundaries arise when Ss respond to continuous variation on a physical dimension in a discontinuous fashion. It is more difficult to discriminate between members of the same category than to discriminate between members of different categories, even though the amount of physical difference between both pairs is the same. Speech stimuli have been the sole class of audit...

  Background :Older adults with cerebrovascular accident (CVA) show evidence of auditory and speech perception problems. In present study, it was examined whether these problems are due to impairments of concurrent auditory segregation procedure which is the basic level of auditory scene analysis and auditory organization in auditory scenes with competing sounds.   Methods : Concurrent auditory...