SPHSC 461
Study Questions on Pitch, Periodicity, and Complex Sound Processing
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Some possible short-answer questions. Answers could be a few sentences long (at most) or a graph or a drawing perhaps.
1. What are the two main types of theories of complex pitch perception? Describe one experimental result supporting each. answer
2. What information does the phase-locked response of auditory nerve fibers provide to the brain? answer
3. Name two ways that the transfer function of the right external ear will change if you move a sound source from 0 degrees azimuth to 40 degrees (clockwise) azimuth. answer
4. Name three kinds of information that people use to localize sounds in space.answer
5. Why are people bad at localizing sounds around 1500 Hz?answer
6. Describe three ways that the auditory system might be able to tell which spectral components are coming from the same source.answer
7. Give two examples of phenomena that show that people are more sensitive to sounds when they can separate them perceptually from background sounds.answer
8. Based on what we know about the information that people use to segregate sound sources, what sorts of responses might you expect to see in central auditory neurons? answer
9. What do we mean when we say speech is redundant?answer
10. How do we use the neural representation of the amplitude spectrum and of the time waveform in the perception of speech?answer
Some true/false questions:
1. Phase locking does not occur at high frequencies, because inner hair cells cannot clear the ions that flow into the hair cell quickly enough. answer
2. People can detect a change in the location of a sound source better when the change occurs in elevation rather than in azimuth.answer
3. The auditory system can combine time and intensity information to encode the location of a sound.answer
4. Elevation is coded in the auditory system by interaural differences.answer
5. If you present a tone in noise to one of a subject's ears it will be easier to hear than if the noise were presented to both of the subject's ears.answer
6. Speech recognition is determined by hearing alone.answer
7. If we test people's perception of consonants varying in voice onset time, the identification function of the consonant will tell us what the discrimination function of that consonant looks like. answer
Some fill in the blank questions:
1. Another name for the difference limen for location is the _____________ ______________ ________. answer2. When people tell us where a sound source appears to be in the sound field we call it _____________; when they tell us where a sound source presented binaurally under earphones appears to be we call it _____________. answer
3. The improvement in audibility that is obtained when a sound is presented dichotically is called the ________________ __________ ___________________. answer
4. ___________ __________ continues to increase as frequency increases, but ________ ___________ repeats at octave intervals. answer
Some definitions:
comodulation masking release answer
sound source segregation answer
categorical perception answer
mel scale answer
musical scale answer
virtual pitch answer
Some possible essay questions:
1. The auditory nerve carries a representation of the amplitude spectrum of sound and a representation of the time waveform of sound, including the fine structure and the envelope. Discuss how each of these representations, or codes, is important in sound localization. Consider how localization will be affected in an individual with outer hair cell loss. answer
2. Discuss two ways that the neural representation of the amplitude spectrum of sound is important in allowing a person to hear one sound in the presence of another sound.
3. A cochlear implant provides its user with a gross representation of the amplitude spectrum of sound, a precise representation of the envelope of the sound waveform, and no representation of the fine structure of the sound waveform. How would you expect a cochlear implant user to differ from a person with normal hearing in their ability to understand speech in a quiet environment and in a noisy environment?
4. How is temporal resolution important in speech perception? Consider both quiet and noisy environments.
5. Imagine a person who has an extremely large (poor) pure-tone frequency jnd. What characteristic of the auditory nerve response might be lacking in this person? What other aspects of hearing (for example, complex pitch perception, speech perception, sound localization and sound source segregation) would you expect to be abnormal in this person?
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Last updated
Tuesday 31-May-2011 3:57 PM