Rapid Serial Auditory Presentation

Author(s):  
Ana Franco ◽  
Julia Eberlen ◽  
Arnaud Destrebecqz ◽  
Axel Cleeremans ◽  
Julie Bertels

Abstract. The Rapid Serial Visual Presentation procedure is a method widely used in visual perception research. In this paper we propose an adaptation of this method which can be used with auditory material and enables assessment of statistical learning in speech segmentation. Adult participants were exposed to an artificial speech stream composed of statistically defined trisyllabic nonsense words. They were subsequently instructed to perform a detection task in a Rapid Serial Auditory Presentation (RSAP) stream in which they had to detect a syllable in a short speech stream. Results showed that reaction times varied as a function of the statistical predictability of the syllable: second and third syllables of each word were responded to faster than first syllables. This result suggests that the RSAP procedure provides a reliable and sensitive indirect measure of auditory statistical learning.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ava Kiai ◽  
Lucia Melloni

Statistical learning (SL) allows individuals to rapidly detect regularities in the sensory environment. We replicated previous findings showing that adult participants become sensitive to the implicit structure in a continuous speech stream of repeating tri-syllabic pseudowords within minutes, as measured by standard tests in the SL literature: a target detection task and a 2AFC word recognition task. Consistent with previous findings, we found only a weak correlation between these two measures of learning, leading us to question whether there is overlap between the information captured by these two tasks. Representational similarity analysis on reaction times measured during the target detection task revealed that reaction time data reflect sensitivity to transitional probability, triplet position, word grouping, and duplet pairings of syllables. However, individual performance on the word recognition task was not predicted by similarity measures derived for any of these four features. We conclude that online detection tasks provide richer and multi-faceted information about the SL process, as compared with 2AFC recognition tasks, and may be preferable for gaining insight into the dynamic aspects of SL.


2001 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 121-143 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicolas Dumay ◽  
Abdelrhani Benraïss ◽  
Brian Barriol ◽  
Cécile Colin ◽  
Monique Radeau ◽  
...  

Phonological priming between bisyllabic (CV.CVC) spoken items was examined using both behavioral (reaction times, RTs) and electrophysiological (event-related potentials, ERPs) measures. Word and pseudoword targets were preceded by pseudoword primes. Different types of final phonological overlap between prime and target were compared. Critical pairs shared the last syllable, the rime or the coda, while unrelated pairs were used as controls. Participants performed a target shadowing task in Experiment 1 and a delayed lexical decision task in Experiment 2. RTs were measured in the first experiment and ERPs were recorded in the second experiment. The RT experiment was carried out under two presentation conditions. In Condition 1 both primes and targets were presented auditorily, while in Condition 2 the primes were presented visually and the targets auditorily. Priming effects were found in the unimodal condition only. RTs were fastest for syllable overlap, intermediate for rime overlap, and slowest for coda overlap and controls that did not differ from one another. ERPs were recorded under unimodal auditory presentation. ERP results showed that the amplitude of the auditory N400 component was smallest for syllable overlap, intermediate for rime overlap, and largest for coda overlap and controls that did not differ from one another. In both experiments, the priming effects were larger for word than for pseudoword targets. These results are best explained by the combined influences of nonlexical and lexical processes, and a comparison of the reported effects with those found in monosyllables suggests the involvement of rime and syllable representations.


2016 ◽  
Vol 25 (6) ◽  
pp. 417-424 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raymond M. Klein ◽  
Jean Saint-Aubin

Understanding reading is a central issue for psychology, with major societal implications. Over the past five decades, a simple letter-detection task has been used as a window on the psycholinguistic processes involved in reading. When readers are asked to read a text for comprehension while marking with a pencil all instances of a target letter, they miss some of the letters in a systematic way known as the missing-letter effect. In the current article, we review evidence from studies that have emphasized neuroimaging, eye movement, rapid serial visual presentation, and auditory passages. As we review, the missing-letter effect captures a wide variety of cognitive processes, including lexical activation, attention, and extraction of phrase structure. To account for the large set of findings generated by studies of the missing-letter effect, we advanced an attentional-disengagement model that is rooted in how attention is allocated to and disengaged from lexical items during reading, which we have recently shown applies equally to listening.


2002 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-40 ◽  
Author(s):  
Salvador Soto-Faraco ◽  
Charles Spence

We studied the attentional blink (AB) and the repetition blindness (RB) effects using an audio-visual presentation procedure designed to overcome several potential methodological confounds in previous cross-modal research. In Experiment 1, two target digits were embedded amongst letter distractors in two concurrent streams (one visual and the other auditory) presented from the same spatial location. Targets appeared in either modality unpredictably at different temporal lags, and the participants’ task was to recall the digits at the end of the trial. We evaluated both AB and RB for pairs of targets presented in either the same or different modalities. Under these conditions both AB and RB were observed in vision, AB but not RB was observed in audition, and there was no evidence of AB or RB cross-modally from audition to vision or vice versa. In Experiment 2, we further investigated the AB by including Lag 1 items and observed Lag 1 sparing, thus ruling out the possibility that the observed effects were due to perceptual and/or conceptual masking. Our results support a distinction between a modality-specific interference at the attentional selection stage and a modality-independent interference at later processing stages. They also provide a new dissociation between the AB and RB.


1977 ◽  
Vol 45 (3_suppl) ◽  
pp. 1203-1210 ◽  
Author(s):  
Randall W. Engle ◽  
Elizabeth D. Durban

Auditorily and visually presented lists were either tested or not tested immediately after input and were later tested on a delayed recognition test. For those lists given the immediate free-recall test, auditory presentation was superior on this immediate test. On the delayed recognition test the tested lists led to higher performance than non-tested lists. For tested lists auditory presentation led to superior recognition for the terminal serial positions, while for non-tested lists visual presentation led to higher performance on the last few positions. The fact that modality of presentation had opposite effects on delayed recognition of the lists was discussed in terms of current models of modality effects.


1981 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 747-750 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Papineau ◽  
Jeffrey M. Lohr

Recall performance on a paired-associate learning task was investigated as a function of word imagery modality (visual or auditory), presentation mode (visual or auditory), and sex. Analysis showed greater recall of visual imagery words, and the results are consistent with Paivio's (1971) conceptual-peg hypothesis. Visual presentation of word lists produced greater recall than auditory presentation, and females exhibited greater recall performance than did males. A predicted interaction between modality for presentation and for word imagery did not reach statistical significance. The implications for future research with sensory imagery in learning are discussed.


2012 ◽  
Vol 25 (0) ◽  
pp. 150-151 ◽  
Author(s):  
Irune Fernández-Prieto ◽  
Fátima Vera-Constán ◽  
Joel García-Morera ◽  
Jordi Navarra

Previous studies suggest the existence of facilitatory effects between, for example, responding upwards/downwards while hearing a high/low-pitched tone, respectively (e.g., Occeli et al., 2009; Rusconi et al., 2006). Neuroimaging research has started to reveal the activation of parietal areas (e.g., the intraparietal sulcus, IPS) during the performance of various pitch-based musical tasks (see Foster and Zatorre, 2010a, 2010b). Since several areas in the parietal cortex (e.g., the IPS; see Chica et al., 2011) are strongly involved in orienting visual attention towards external events, we investigated the possible effects of perceiving pitch-varying stimuli (i.e., ‘ascending’ or ‘descending’ flutter sounds) on the spatial processing of visual stimuli. In a variation of the Posner cueing paradigm (Posner, 1980), participants performed a speeded detection task of a visual target that could appear at one of four different spatial positions (two above and two below the fixation point). Irrelevant ascending (200–700 Hz) or descending (700–200 Hz) flutter sounds were randomly presented 550 ms before the onset of the visual target. According to our results, faster reaction times were observed when the visual target appeared in a position (up/down) that was compatible with the ‘pitch direction’ (ascending or descending) of the previously-presented auditory ‘cuing’ stimulus. Our findings suggest that pitch-varying sounds are recoded spatially, thus modulating visual spatial attention.


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