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Re: Informational Masking



You're right: in the example of the gobbledegook sentence, we are talking
about a shorter time span. I think it's the same with a 'tune' - some sort
of understanding is required to reproduce it. So it's not just a linguistic
thing. In fact, repeating a sound seems to be an attempt at understanding.
I'm not sure if this is related to VS Ramachandran's "mirror neurons".
ppl
----- Original Message -----
From: "Christian Kaernbach" <chris@PSYCHOLOGIE.UNI-LEIPZIG.DE>
To: <AUDITORY@LISTS.MCGILL.CA>
Sent: 03 March 2001 07:16
Subject: Re: Informational Masking


> > ... I can think of many examples where I'm able to repeat, after a
> > period, a very reasonable representation of the sound of the sentence
> > which had been spoken to me, even though so doing produces a sentence
> > which is complete nonsense.
> ...
> > in the 'gobbledegook' reconstruction of the sentence, it's usually
> > the consonants that I've got wrong (.....I think). The vowel sounds
> > seem fairly right, and the rhythm overall seems right, even though
> > the division into words has often gone awry.
>
> Could it be that this gobbledegook reconstruction happens after a time
> span which is closer to 20 s than to 15 min? 20 s is quite a long time,
> so one might be surprised to be able to do so after 20 s, though I
> wouldn't. Long auditory storage (Cowan, 1984) can be as long as that. In
> cases with more than a minute inbetween I would suspect partial
> understanding of the sentence.
> - Christian
>