Subjective impression of steady-state and intermittent sounds was examined. The component sound of intermittent sounds has 30ms riseand fall-time without steadystate portion and LAmax was 70 dB. The carrier was white noise. The number of component sounds was varied from 5 to 80 in 4800ms total duration of the sound. The steady-state sound with the same duration was also used. The sound levels o...

Environmental sounds can be powerful alarm signals. Hence, attentional orienting towards their location might occur extremely rapidly. Here, we used the beep probe task to investigate attentional biases to negative, positive and taboo sounds. While both left-presented negative and taboo sounds elicited attentional avoidance, taboo but not negative sounds triggered Inhibition of Return. Moreover...

Several investigators have noted external gallop sounds to be of higher amplitude than their corresponding internal sounds (S3 and S4). In this study we hoped to determine if S3 and S4 are transmitted in the same manner as S,. In 11 closed-chest dogs, external (apical) and left ventricular pressures and sounds were recorded simultaneously with transducers with identical sensitivity and frequenc...

The current study is part of a larger project aiming at offering intuitive mappings for the control of synthesis models by semantic descriptions of sounds, i.e. simple verbal labels related to various feelings, emotions, gestures or motions. Hence, this work is directly related to the general problem of semiotics of sounds. We here put a special interest in sounds evoking different perceived mo...

This study provides new experimental evidence that people learn phonological alternations in a biased way. Adult participants were exposed to alternations between phonetically dissimilar sounds (i.e., those differing in both voicing and manner, such as [p] and [v]). After learning these alternations, participants assumed, without evidence in the input, that more similar sounds (e.g., [b] and [v...

Imagine standing on a street corner in the city. With your eyes closed you can hear and recognize succession of sounds: cars passing by, people speaking, their footsteps when they walk continuous falling rain. The recognition all these sounds interpretation perceived scene as city soundscape comes naturally to humans. It is, however, result years "training": encountering learning associations a...

It is commonly assumed that, in the cochlea and the brainstem, the auditory system processes speech sounds without differentiating them from any other sounds. At some stage, however, it must treat speech sounds and nonspeech sounds differently, since we perceive them as different. The purpose of this study was to delimit the first location in the auditory pathway that makes this distinction usi...

Describing unidentified sounds with words is a frustrating task and vocally imitating them is often a convenient way to address the issue. This article reports on a study that compared the effectiveness of vocal imitations and verbalizations to communicate different referent sounds. The stimuli included mechanical and synthesized sounds and were selected on the basis of participants' confidence...

BACKGROUND Sound production is widespread among fishes and accompanies many social interactions. The literature reports twenty-nine cichlid species known to produce sounds during aggressive and courtship displays, but the precise range in behavioural contexts is unclear. This study aims to describe the various Oreochromis niloticus behaviours that are associated with sound production in order t...