Subject: Re: Does anybody know a similar study? From: Christine Rankovic <rankovic@xxxxxxxx> Date: Wed, 18 Jun 2014 14:42:18 -0400 List-Archive:<http://lists.mcgill.ca/scripts/wa.exe?LIST=AUDITORY>Hello Massimo: I think some work under the topic of "auditory priming" may be relevant. A starting point may be: Freyman, R.L., Balakrishan, U., and Helfer, K., (2004). "Effect of number of masking talkers and auditory priming on informational masking in speech recognition," Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 115, 2246-2256. Christine Rankovic -----Original Message----- From: AUDITORY - Research in Auditory Perception [mailto:AUDITORY@xxxxxxxx On Behalf Of Massimo Grassi Sent: Tuesday, June 17, 2014 10:47 AM To: AUDITORY@xxxxxxxx Subject: Does anybody know a similar study? Dear list members, yesterday I colleague played me a sample (a sentence) of highly degraded speech. It was a recording made in a highly noisy environment. It included speech (a conversation) that was hardly intelligible except for a few occasional words. The colleague asked me to listen to the sample and pay attention whether I was able to spot a few target words. These words were not intelligible to me. The colleague then selected a portion of the recording and played it in loop. That portion included (according to him) one target word. After a few loops I was able to "perceive" the word. This is exactly the problem. I'm wandering whether it was just a suggestion due to the repeated listening of an ambiguous auditory signal. A kid of auditory Rorschach test: there seem to be nothing at the beginning but if you keep listening you can hear whatever you like. Is there anybody out there that is aware of studies that investigated whether listening in loop to an ambiguous signal can lead to hear things that are not in the signal? I didn't find anything yet. Thank you all in advance, m -- http://www.psy.unipd.it/~grassi/ http://www.springer.com/978-1-4614-2196-2