Non-phonological stimuli

[Livia King <kingl@xxxxxxx>]

Dear List,

I am doing a project involving phonological processing using auditory
words and pseudowords.  I am trying to find a good non-phonological
control stimulus that does not contain recognizable phonemes, but
still has similar characteristics and complexity to speech.  An ideal
solution would be some kind of filtering or distortion that I could
apply to my existing word stimuli so that each word is matched with
its own control, but I would be open to independently generated
stimuli as well.  I have tried playing the words backwards, and have
experimented a little with band pass filtering, but the results still
end up sounding too "phonological."  Does anyone know of better
options?  Since we're doing a matching task, each control stimulus
would also have to be unique sounding enough for our subjects to
discriminate.

Thank you in advance,

Livia King