PubMed · 6728975
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D J Povel. 1984. A theoretical framework for rhythm perception.. https://doi.org/10.1007/bf00309709
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Learners rely on a combination of experience-independent and experience-dependent mechanisms to extract information from the environment. Language acquisition involves both types of mechanisms, but most theorists emphasize the relative importance of experience-independent mechanisms. The present study shows that a fundamental task of language acquisition, segmentation of words from fluent speech, can be accomplished by 8-month-old infants based solely on the statistical relationships between neighboring speech sounds. Moreover, this word segmentation was based on statistical learning from only 2 minutes of exposure, suggesting that infants have access to a powerful mechanism for the computation of statistical properties of the language input.
People can perceive a number of spatial and other properties of objects, without the benefit of vision, simply by wielding and hefting the objects. A variety of recent experiments are reported, showing that in this kind of touching, which is closely connected with the states of muscles, the nervous system cleverly exploits the physics of rotations.
A series of experiments investigated listeners' ability to encode the fundamental frequency (F0) of a group of harmonics (the "target") in the presence of a second, spectrally overlapping, group (the "masker"). Experiment 1a was a sequential F0 discrimination task between two targets, whose F0s were geometrically centered on 210 Hz, in the presence of a 210-Hz masker. The target and the masker were bandpass filtered identically, either from 20 to 1420 Hz ("low-frequency" condition) or from 3900 to 5400 Hz ("high-frequency" condition). In the low-frequency condition the masker affected performance only moderately, regardless of whether it was gated synchronously with, or was turned on 150 ms before and off 150 ms after, each 200-ms target. In the high-frequency condition, the synchronous masker also had a moderate effect, but the asynchronous masker reduced performance dramatically. Whatever the masker gating, listeners did not hear the combination of the masker and target in this region as a mixture of two complex tones, but experienced a unitary noiselike or "crackle" percept. Experiment 1b showed that the large deterioration seen in the high-frequency condition of experiment 1a could be obtained in the low-frequency condition by reducing the F0 to 62.5 Hz, suggesting that the resolvability of adjacent harmonics was important for the effect. Experiment 2 required listeners to detect a difference in F0 ("delta F0") between two simultaneous groups of components, one filtered in the high region and the other in the low region. Performance was only slightly degraded by a continuous masker filtered in the low region, but was reduced to chance by a masker in the high region. Experiment 3 showed that, as the delta F0 between a masker and a target in the low region increased from 1% to 8%, listeners identified the mixture as sounding progressively "less fused," but this was not the case in the high region. It is concluded that listeners are poor at extracting the F0s of two groups of unresolved harmonics in the same frequency region. The experiments provide no evidence that listeners can use the leading part of an asynchronous masker to identify its F0 and thereby help extract the target's F0 from the mixture.