Detecting temporal asynchrony with asynchronous standards

The ability of listeners to detect asynchrony in either the temporal onset or offset of individual components in a multicomponent complex was investigated. A standard stimulus was created having a simple kind of asynchrony by linearly delaying successive components of a complex stimulus. Additional asynchrony (the signal) was created by altering the temporal position of a single component of the complex relative to its temporal position in the standard. Asynchrony discrimination was measured for harmonic signals (experiment I) and for complexes in which the components were logarithmically spaced in frequency (experiment II). For the onset condition, asynchrony in either the harmonic or logarithmic complex greatly increased the difficulty in detecting the temporal asynchrony of a single component. For the offset condition, asynchrony discrimination was not greatly affected by asynchrony in the standard.