Subject: Examples of illusions increasing intelligibility From: Richard M Warren <rmwarren(at)CSD.UWM.EDU> Date: Thu, 26 Feb 1998 13:55:17 -0600Stuart Rosen wrote that: >in much work with improving the perception of speech in noise, it is very >easy to make the speech 'sound' better, but very hard to raise its >intellibility >Are people aware of other examples like this, in which an illusory >percept improves performance objectively? In reply: When noise is inserted into the spectral gap between two widely separated narrow bands of speech (either word lists or sentences), intelligibility increases [Warren et al., Perception & Psychophysics, 1997, 59, 275-283]. When noise is added to multiple temporal gaps in broadband speech, intelligibility does not improve for word lists (but they do sound better). However, when noise is added to multiple temporal gaps in sentences, intelligibility does increase [Bashford et al., Perception & Psychophysics, 1992, 51, 211-217].