Related Experiment Video
Updated: Aug 11, 2026

Uncovering Beat Deafness: Detecting Rhythm Disorders with Synchronized Finger Tapping and Perceptual Timing Tasks
Published on: March 16, 2015
Acoustic redundancy and the perception of time-compressed speech
Abstract:
An experiment is reported in which time-compressed sentences were heard spoken either in normal intonation or in intonation patterns that conflicted with their underlying syntactic structure. Although there was an overall decrement in intelligibility with increasing compression, sentences heard in normal intonation were significantly better able to withstand the debilitating effects of compression than those with anomalous intonation. An error analysis of subject responses suggests that intonation normally operates to supply supplemental cues for determining syntactic structures as a step in the perceptual coding of heard speech.
Related Concept Videos
Perception of Sound Waves
The pitch of a sound depends on the frequency and the pressure amplitude of the source. Two sounds of the same frequency...
Interference: Path Lengths
Two special sources may be considered when they are in phase. This can be easily achieved by feeding the two sources from the same source. An example would be synchronizing the two speakers by feeding them with the same source, such as the sound waves produced by a tuning fork. This setup ensures that the two sources have the same frequency and are...
Echo
Imagine the sound is reflected back to the ears. Assuming that the source is very close to the human, the difference between hearing the two sounds—the emitted sound and the reflected sound—may be more than the minimum time for perceiving distinct sounds. If this is the case, then the...
Aliasing
If the sampling frequency is below the Nyquist rate, these replicas overlap, preventing the original signal...
Auditory Perception
Chunking and Rehearsal in Sensory Memory

