comodulation and auditory object formation in sentences

[Tom Carrell <tcarrell@xxxxxxx>]

Auditory Group,

I am gratified to see the interest in the Carrell & Opie paper
published in the most recent Perception and Psychophysics.  We
believe that this work is directly related to the recent
discussions here on the growing body of work regarding auditory
object formation in speech and speech-like signals.  As a matter
of fact, a couple of weeks ago Pierre Divenyi briefly described
his groups work on comodulation masking release and speech
perception in noise.  This work appears to directly address some
of the most important issues raised by Carrrell & Opie and we
eagerly await more information from this group (perhaps through
this forum?).

Although we intend to respond in the Auditory list to some
specific questions and comments that have appeared here
regarding this work, I'd first like to try a little internetwork
feasability experiment.  We have work which is related to many
of the points brought up here in the past couple of days.  However,
the relevant papers are, as yet, either unpublished or difficult to
obtain.  What I'd like to do is make this work available for
internet ftp from our laboratory computer.

As a start I have made available the chapter, "Acoustical cues to
auditory object formation in sentences."  This will eventually
appear in the book Theories in Spoken Language:  Perception,
Production, and Development. J.  Luce, P. Luce, & Sawusch
(Eds.), Ablex Press.  (Lord only knows when it will actually get
published!)

To retrieve the chapter (including figures and sample acoustic
stimuli), you should ftp to ssl.speech.nwu.edu.  Login as
"archive," password= "guest."  The file is available in three
formats:
1.  Word for Windows (the file's native format).  File: AOW4W.ZIP
2.  RTF (RTF is readable with a variety of recent Mac and PC
    word processing programs and retains the formatting, figures,
    and sounds).  File:  AORTF.ZIP (an uncompressed AO.RTF file
    is also there, and very big!)
3.  Text format (the figures are separate gif files and the sounds are
    separate RIFF (well, ok, Microsoft) .WAV format files.
    File: AOTXT.ZIP

You only need one of these files depending on which computer you
have.  You will also need an "unzipping" program such as pkunzip
to decompress the files (with the exception of AO.RTF which is an
uncpmpressed ascii file).  Note that those of you with recent
versions of Word for Windows or Word for the Mac should be able
to hear the stimuli and see the figures easily.  Others will
have to work a little harder to get sound output and figure
display.

As time permits, I will put a few more papers at
archive.ssl.speech.nwu.edu -- including a poster presented at ASA
a couple of years ago describing the effect of comodulation on
sentences presented in a background of multi-speaker babble.

I hope this internet experiment turns out to be more useful than
frustrating to those of you who try to get these files.
Technology does have a way of biting the hand that feeds it.

Tom Carrell
Communication Sciences & Disorders
Northwestern University
tcarrell@nwu.edu