Waveform interactions and the segregation of concurrent vowels

Two experiments investigated the effects of small values of fundamental frequency difference (ΔF0) on the identification of concurrent vowels. As ΔF0’s get smaller, mechanisms that exploit them must necessarily fail, and the pattern of breakdown may tell which mechanisms are used by the auditory system. Small ΔF0’s also present a methodological difficulty. If the stimulus is shorter than the beat period, its spectrum depends on which part of the beat pattern is sampled. A different starting phase might produce a different experimental outcome, and the experiment may lack generality. The first experiment explored the effects of ΔF0’s as small as 0.4%. The smallest ΔF0 conditions were synthesized with several starting phases obtained by gating successive segments of the beat pattern. An improvement in identification was demonstrated for ΔF0’s as small as 0.4% for all segments. Differences between segments (or starting phase) were also observed, but when averaged over vowel pairs they were of small magnitude...

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