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An Auditory Illusion



I have a comment and a question concerning the "high-low illusion" on
Deutsch's CD referred to in Mercuri's e-mail to recipients of the
Auditory List.  The illusion on the CD, in which the alternating words
"high" and "low" changed to other words when repeated is called the
"verbal transformation effect" and was reported by me in the late 1950s.
It occurs when any clearly enunciated word, phrase, or sentence is heard
to repeat over and over, and can involve considerable phonetic
distortion.  I have published about ten articles on this topic, and all
told there are roughly 80-90 papers in the literature dealing with this
illusion.

The question I have concerns a puzzling variant of verbal transformations
that occurs when each ear hears the same repeated word dichotically with
the delay of 1/2 the repetition period separating the repeating
statements in each ear -- the illusory changes occur independently on
each side, so that different forms can be heard simultaneously at each
ear.  I believe I understand how and why monaural and diotic changes
occur -- and the question is:  If there is a single speech processor, how
can the same stimulus be heard asynchronously as two forms that are
sometimes dramatically different?  There is also a "trichotic" version
that also works if three asynchronous statements of the same repeating
word (each separated by 1/3 period from the other two) are heard
simultaneously at different locations (monaural right, monaural left, and
diotic center).  Then, three different forms may be heard at the same time.

If anyone has any ideas on this topic, please let me know.