What role do the sound and the silent gap between them play in perceiving this series of sounds?

What is it about?

When we hear a series of sounds, we actually perceive two types of information: one is the sounds; the second is the silent gaps between the sounds. The present paper continues our previous study from 2013 that showed that both factors play a similar role in the perception of a series of sounds. Here, we extended this previous work by testing much shorter sounds (starting from 3 msec - Experiment 1) and adding participants with difficulty in processing a series of sounds (aging adults, who show a deficit in temporal processing - Experiment 2). The conclusions of the present studies support our previous one and show that temporal information is extracted both from the sounds as well as from the silent gaps between them, even for very short sounds and for participants with deficits in temporal processing.

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Photo by Samuel Rios on Unsplash

Photo by Samuel Rios on Unsplash

Why is it important?

The current work shed additional light on the sources we use for gathering temporal information that is crucial for auditory functioning, such as speech comprehension.