Priming the Identification of Environmental Sounds

Three experiments were conducted using a repetition priming paradigm: Auditory word or environmental sound stimuli were identified by subjects in a pre-test phase, which was followed by a perceptual identification task using either sounds or words in the test phase. Identification of an environmental sound was facilitated by prior presentation of the same sound, but not by prior presentation of a spoken label (Experiments 1 and 2). Similarly, spoken word identification was facilitated by previous presentation of the same word, but not when the word had been used to label an environmental sound (Experiment 1). A degree of abstraction was demonstrated in Experiment 3, which revealed a facilitation effect between similar sounds produced by the same type of source. These results are discussed in terms of the Transfer Appropriate Processing, activation, and systems approaches.     

Modulation of the Irrelevant Sound Effect by Organizational Factors: Further Evidence from Streaming by Location

An irrelevant sequence of discrete auditory tokens disrupts serial recall markedly if successive tokens differ, but the disruption is less marked if the sound is repeated. However, the relation of stimulus mismatch and degree of disruption with serial recall seems to be modulated by organizational principles such as streaming by pitch and streaming by location. The current empirical work replicates the finding that the impact of changing sequences can be reduced if tokens are assigned to different locations in such a way as to form separate streams, each containing sequences of repeated tokens. This study shows that this phenomenon is not a consequence of reducing the number of tokens per stream.