Auditory Illusions as Caused by Embedded Sounds

An auditory illusion can be induced by listening to a speech sound presented repeatedly on a loop tape for a period of time. The present experiment shows that auditory illusions reported for CV syllables are caused by consonant sounds “embedded” in the syllable. Embedded sounds were identified for English consonants by removing successive segments from the onset of the sound. For instance, if the initial high‐frequency segment present in the sound /sa/ is removed, the remaining sound is a perfectly clear /da/. In fact, subjects report hearing an illusory /da/ while listening to the sound/sa/repeated on a loop tape. Results of the experiment show that illusions reported for each consonant phoneme are perfectly predicted by identifying each of the embedded sounds which exist within them. To further test the hypothesis that embedded sounds cause the illusions, the embedded sounds were removed from the original stimulus and presented to the subjects in the same fashion. This technique does not alter the origi...