Psychology
Hearing
Hearing is the process of perceiving sound through the ears. It involves the reception of auditory stimuli and the transmission of this information to the brain for interpretation. Hearing plays a crucial role in communication, language development, and social interaction.
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9 Key excerpts on "Hearing"
eBook - PDF- Koen Lamberts, Rob Goldstone, Koen Lamberts, Rob Goldstone(Authors)
- 2004(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications Ltd(Publisher)
I NTRODUCTION The problem of Hearing Most of us live in very noisy environments. Throughout the day we are bombarded by sounds, some of which are useless, some annoying, and some of which may be vital for our survival. Although the auditory system evolved in more peaceful times than these, it still manages to perform remarkably well on the incredibly complex task that is demanded of it. In most cases we seem to hear so effortlessly that we do not appreciate the depth of the neural processing that underlies our perceptions. Our ears receive a mixture of all the sounds in the environment at a given time. We have to be able to separate out the sounds in which we are interested, then decode the separated sounds into meaningful information. A commonly used analogy can help illus-trate the difficulty of the problem. Imagine that you are paddling on the shore of a lake. Three people are swimming on the lake, producing ripples that combine to form a complex pattern of tiny waves arriving at your feet. Looking only at the pattern of waves below you, you have to calculate: (i) how many swimmers there are and where they are located on the lake; (ii) how many swimming strokes each one is making every second; and (iii) which swimming stroke each one is using. If you think that is hard, try doing the same thing with a speedboat on the water, producing huge, slow waves that crash over your legs. Although the computation sounds impossible, the auditory system can manage tasks of even greater complexity involving sound waves. The research presented in this chapter is a small representative of over a hundred years of investigation into how this is achieved. What is psychoacoustics? Psychoacoustics can be defined simply as the psychological study of Hearing. The aim of psycho-acoustic research is to find out how Hearing works. In other words, the aim is to discover how sounds are processed by the ear and the brain in order to give the listener information about the world out-side.
eBook - PDF- Peter F. Ostwald(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
INTRODUCTORY STATEMENT Auditory behavior encompasses a number of patterns which, while dissectable for scientific purposes, are really interdependent and coordi-nated parts of a listener's experience. First is his readiness to take-in sounds, what the physiologist calls AUDITION . This requires a physical mechanism for sound reception - i.e. external-ear canals, middle-ear bony structures, and inner-ear cochlear apparatuses for transducing acoustical energy into neuronal signals. Next is the listener's ability to orient himself to sounds, what the psychologist calls ATTENTION . The neural linkages between cochlea and brain have to be given a certain priority in order that external acoustical stimuli achieve conscious recognition as sound. Finally there is the listener's willingness to commit himself as to the meanings of sounds, what the semiotician calls INTER-PRETATION . Auditory information processed by the brain has to be evaluated and categorized according to immediacies of social existence, the varied experiences of the past, and the anticipation of a future which seems relevant to the listener. Naturally the three aspects of listening -audition, attention, and interpretation - do not necessarily occur in this sequence. For example, the interpretative functions of listening may already be strikingly active before any acoustical information is processed. This is the expectation which for example enables a person to 'hear' something before it happens. The papers in Section III all deal in one way or another with auditory perception. The opening paper, 12, was written for a symposium on Experimental Psychopathology held at the Third World Congress of Psychiatry, in Montreal, Canada, 1961. It reviews the information then available about eifects of four types of sound - (1) words, (2) music, (3) noise, (4) body sounds - and of course the emphasis is on psycho-pathology. One of my interests at the time was to explore the specifically
eBook - PDFSensation, Perception and Action
An Evolutionary Perspective
- Johannes Zanker(Author)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- Bloomsbury Academic(Publisher)
The exact measure of sound pressure (in dB) will finally put into relation with the perception of loudness in its ecological context of typical environments experienced by humans, and some practical consequences in the context of occupational and environmental health are discussed. WHY DO YOU NEED EARS, WHY SHOULD YOU LISTEN? The first question about auditory perception needs to be why Hearing is important for us as human beings. Sounds signal events, and because we are interested in events that happen in our environment, Hearing opens a powerful channel to collect a range of information from the outside world. The sound of an approaching train or braking car, a mouse rustling in the leaves, the impact of the snowball on a window, or raindrops tapping on a tin roof, are some random examples of how we use our ears to orient ourselves in a cluttered environment, and relate to other objects and creatures. Most importantly, important alarm signals are transmitted through the auditory channel, and many animals have developed highly specialised Hearing mechanisms to pick up the sound of approaching predators, or trace animals of prey. But there is more to Hearing, because we not only hear sound passively generated by other animate or inanimate objects, but we also generate sound to be heard by others. Just like the songs of birds, Hearing 1: SOUND AND NOISE 7 86 Sensation, Perception and Action the courtship signals of insects, or alarm calls of higher mammals, humans communicate by producing acoustic signals. Acoustic communication in humans has developed into a highly sophisticated system, language, which requires a fine auditory system to receive and extract all the information contained in acoustic signals, sometimes hidden in very fine nuances.
eBook - PDFThe Sounds of Language
An Introduction to Phonetics and Phonology
- Elizabeth C. Zsiga(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
The Sounds of Language: An Introduction to Phonetics and Phonology, First Edition. Elizabeth C. Zsiga. © 2013 Elizabeth C. Zsiga. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd. The chief function of the body is to carry the brain around. Thomas Edison Chapter outline 9.1 Anatomy and physiology of the ear 174 9.2 Neuro-anatomy 181 9.2.1 Studying the brain 181 9.2.2 Primary auditory pathways 183 9.3 Speech perception 186 9.3.1 Non-linearity 186 9.3.2 Variability and invariance 187 9.3.3 Cue integration 190 9.3.4 Top-down processing 192 9.3.5 Units of perception 192 Chapter summary 194 Further reading 195 Review exercises 195 Further analysis and discussion 196 Go online 197 References 197 9 Hearing and Speech Perception 174 Hearing AND SPEECH PERCEPTION The preceding chapters have covered the topic of how speech sounds are created by the vocal tract – articulatory phonetics. They have also covered the topic of how the speech waves thus created propagate through the air, and how they can be mathematically analyzed – acoustic phonetics. This chapter is about how speech sounds are analyzed by the human ear, and the human brain. What happens in the ear is Hearing; what happens in the brain in speech per- ception. Hearing refers to the physiological process of transferring energy from sound waves to nerve impulses. Speech perception refers to the mapping of sounds into linguistic representations. We begin with the anatomy and physiology of the ear, then cover a little bit of neuro-anatomy, and finally discuss some current issues in speech perception, including the nonlinear relationship between acoustic and perceptual measures, problems of variability and invariance (including normalization and categorical perception), cue integration, top- down processing, and the question of the units of perception and thus of linguistic representation. 9.1 anatomy and physiology of the ear The ear has three parts: outer, middle, and inner.
eBook - PDF- Edward Carterette(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Academic Press(Publisher)
Recognition of this state of affairs should not obscure the fact that noteworthy contributions to auditory re-search are still being made by psychologists interested in the auditory chan-nel as a special source of sensory information and as an important area of the study of perception. As usual, it is risky to suggest cause and effect, but it appears to be true that with the movement of auditory research out of psychology, the percep-tion of signals became, to a distressing degree, only a tool for assessing the mechanics of operation of the system, and not the primary object of study by students of audition. To return briefly to the first point, the plan of this chapter is to describe the course of progress on each of the problems that have been the center of attention of research workers in audition. For any highly specialized field of inquiry, the history of research is primarily a discussion of the unsolved and partially solved problems in the area. Certainly this appears to be a useful way to examine the history of research in audition. No attempt is made to acknowledge the influence or lack of influence of a particular contributor during the period, except as it bears heavily on one of the central problems. It is difficult to find fault with this method of proceeding if one is convinced that work of value is its own sufficient reward, and convinced also that a fortunate state of affairs exists when an area of scientific endeavor emerges from the vulnerable stage where the credibility of a finding is weighted by knowledge of its source. II. PINNA Literally the most visible of the auditory components whose function might be of interest to the psychologist are the pinnae. Intriguing from the psychological point of view is the assertion that front-back confusions in localization of sounds are at least partially eliminated by the presence of the pinna.
- Ulrike Gut(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
6 Speech perception Our ability to speak depends crucially on our ability to hear. Babies who are born deaf do not acquire speech (they use sign language for communication instead), although they have fully functioning speech organs. Not being able to hear, they cannot learn about the relevant units (such as phonemes, syllables and words) and rules of speech and cannot form mental representations (i.e. knowledge stored in their memory) of them. Yet, as chapters 3 and 4 explained, without mental representations of the units and rules of speech, the production of speech is not possible. This chapter describes the anatomy (structure) and physiology (function) of the organs that are involved in the perception of speech, although it has to be stressed that even today our knowledge about some of the fundamental processes of Hearing is still incomplete. Like the speech organs used for articulation, the organs of speech perception are divided into 'systems', namely the peripheral auditory system - the ear - and the internal auditory system - the relevant parts of the brain. The three components of the peripheral auditory system, namely the outer, the middle and the inner ear, are described in sections 6.1 to 6.3. Section 6.4 illustrates the fimction of the internal auditory system. The perception of the acoustic cues of the speech signal and the methods of measuring these are described in sections 6.5 and 6.6. Section 6.7 presents theories of the perception of sounds and words, and section 6.8 describes what we know about the acquisition of perceptual abilities in first and second language acquisition. 6.1 The outer ear Figure 6.1 illustrates the three parts of the human peripheral auditory system, which is divided into the outer, the middle and the inner ear. The outer ear consists of the pinna, the only visible part of the human auditory system, and the ear canal, or meatus.
eBook - PDF- E. Goldstein, James Brockmole(Authors)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Cengage Learning EMEA(Publisher)
260 CHAPTER 11 Hearing For an animal living in the forest, the rustle of leaves or the snap of a twig may signal the approach of a predator. For humans, Hearing provides signals such as the warning sound of a smoke alarm or an ambulance siren, the distinctive high- pitched cry of a baby who is distressed, or telltale noises that indicate problems in a car engine. Hearing not only informs us about things that are happening that we can’t see, but perhaps most important of all, it adds richness to our lives through music and facilitates communication by means of speech. This chapter is the first of three chapters on Hearing. We begin, as we did for vision, by asking some basic questions about the stimulus: How can we describe the pressure changes in the air that is the stimulus for Hearing? How is the stimulus measured? What perceptions does it cause? We then describe the anatomy of the ear and how the pressure changes make their way through the structures of the ear in order to stimu- late the receptors for Hearing. Once we have established these basic facts about auditory system stimulus and structure, we consider one of the central questions of auditory research: What is the physiological mech- anism for our perception of pitch, which is the quality that orders notes on a musical scale, as when we go from low to high pitches by moving from left to right on a piano keyboard? We will see that the search for the physiological mechanism of pitch has led to a number of different theories and that, although we understand a great deal about how the auditory system creates pitch, there are still problems that remain to be solved. Near the end of this chapter, we complete our description of the structure of the auditory system by describing the path- way from the ear to the auditory cortex.
eBook - PDF- J. Gavin Bremner, Alan Fogel(Authors)
- 2009(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
Some of the most surprising and theoretically provocative findings in the field of developmen- tal psychology in recent years have emerged from research on how infants listen to voices. Infants are born with inborn perceptual biases and with learning strategies that enable them to detect regularities in patterns of speech sounds that will eventually give them access to linguistic structure. Even in utero, the fetus is attentive to sound patterns that will be crucial for learning to communicate in postnatal life. The experience of Hearing a language over the first year shapes the early organization of auditory experience, prepar- ing the infant’s mind for language understanding. Conclusions Helen Keller reportedly remarked that being deaf was more difficult for her than being blind, because although blindness isolated her from things, deafness isolated her from people (Goldstein, 1999). Hearing and vision are both important in human 62 Anne Fernald communication, but sound plays a special role because of its intrinsic association with movement. All sounds originate in movement, and the movements most crucial for us to detect, to monitor, and to interpret originate in the actions of other living beings, most notably the vocalizations of other people. For the Hearing infant, the ability to detect and monitor sound is already active to some extent prenatally. After birth, the sounds of human voices move the infant emotionally and begin to convey fundamental information relevant to language. Infants are attentive to this information months before the dawning of language comprehension, learning about the rhythms and segmental structure of the sounds involved in speech. Music is another complex form of auditory stimulation associated with human movement.
eBook - PDFAuditory Disorders in School Children
The Law, Identification, Remediation
- Ross J. Roeser, Marion P. Downs, Ross J. Roeser, Marion P. Downs(Authors)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- Thieme(Publisher)
PSYCHOEDUCATIONAL ASSESSMENT OF INDIVIDUALS WITH Hearing LOSS 157 curriculum against which it is referenced. The three areas evaluated are sound aware-ness, phonetic listening, and auditory com-prehension. Earlier in the history of the psychology of deafness, Myklebust (1960) proposed the or-ganismic shift hypothesis to address whether deaf and hard-of-Hearing individuals come to rely on and use their remaining senses, particularly vision, in a compensatory way. Since then, this hypothesis has been de-bated. Bolton (1978), for example, performed a factor analysis of the Hiskey-Nebraska Test of Learning Aptitude and suggested that the factor patterns were consistent with this hypothesis; whereas others, such as Moores (2001), have rejected the notion of the organismic shift hypothesis and have suggested that individuals with Hearing loss are no different than individuals with hear-ing. More recently, with the increased inter-est in the visual and neurolinguistic process-ing of various indigenous signed languages, such as American Sign Language (ASL), there has been renewed interest in the differ-ential use of vision and visual processing and Myklebust’s organismic shift hypothe-sis. Collectively, these studies have sug-gested that, although no differences exist be-tween individuals who have Hearing and those who are congenitally deaf in process-ing information in central vision, significant differences exist in the sensitivity and range of processing information in the periphery of vision (Swisher, 1993) that cannot be ex-plained on the basis of sign language alone (Proksch & Bavelier, 2002). Differences in vi-sual search patterns (Stivalet, Moreno, Richard, Barraud, & Raphel, 1998), process-ing of motion (Armstrong, Neville, Hillyard, & Mitchell, 2002), and selectively processing a target while ignoring distracters, in favor of individuals with Hearing loss (Bosworth, 2001), have been found as well.
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