Search results for "Perceptual Masking"

Factors Influencing Tinnitus Loudness and Annoyance

2006

Objective To evaluate the 2 major components of tinnitus severity, loudness and annoyance, and their degree of dependence on characteristics of tinnitus manifestation, history, and etiology. Design Cross-sectional survey performed during the first months of 2004. Setting Nonclinical population. Participants A total of 4995 members of the German Tinnitus League. Main Outcome Measures Comprehensive screening questionnaire, including the Klockhoff and Lindblom loudness grading system and the miniversion of the Tinnitus Questionnaire. Results A moderate correlation of 0.45 was found between tinnitus loudness and annoyance. Both factors were generally higher in men, those older than 50 years, th…

Does sound stimulation have additive effects on cognitive-behavioral treatment of chronic tinnitus?

2003

Psychological and physiological habituation are major goals in the treatment of patients suffering from chronic tinnitus. This study evaluates whether sound stimulation provided by use of low level white noise generators (NG) enhances the effects of cognitive-behavioral treatment (CBT). 124 outpatients with tinnitus of >6 months received manualized group treatment and were randomly assigned to the NG/no NG conditions. Those with moderate tinnitus-related distress obtained four sessions focusing on education, while severely distressed subjects were treated according to a full 10-session CBT program. Outcome was assessed at post-treatment and at 6- and 18-month follow-up. No additive effects …

Blocking by word frequency and neighborhood density in visual word recognition: A task-specific response criteria account

2004

International audience; Effects of blocking words by frequency class (high vs. low) and neighborhood density (high vs. low) were examined in two experiments using progressive demasking and lexical decision tasks. The aim was to examine the predictions of a task-specific response criteria account of list-blocking effects. Distinct patterns of blocking effects were obtained in the two tasks. In the progressive demasking task, a pure-list disadvantage was obtained to low frequency-high density words, whereas high frequency-low density produced a trend toward a pure-list advantage. In lexical decision, high-frequency words showed a pure-list advantage that was strongest in high-density words, w…

2013

To identify factors limiting performance in multitone intensity discrimination, we presented sequences of five pure tones alternating in level between loud (85 dB SPL) and soft (30, 55, or 80 dB SPL). In the “overall-intensity task”, listeners detected a level increment on all of the five tones. In the “masking task”, the level increment was imposed only on the soft tones, rendering the soft tones targets and loud tones task-irrelevant maskers. Decision weights quantifying the importance of the five tone levels for the decision were estimated using methods of molecular psychophysics. Compatible with previous studies, listeners placed higher weights on the loud tones than on the soft tones i…

Transposed-Letter Priming Effects for Close Versus Distant Transpositions

2009

Transposing two internal letters of a word produces a perceptually similar item (e.g., CHOLOCATE being processed as CHOCOLATE). To determine the precise nature of the encoding of letter position within a word, we examined the effect of the number of intervening letters in transposed-letter effects with a masked priming procedure. In Experiment 1, letter transposition could involve adjacent letters (chocloate-CHOCOLATE) and nonadjacent letters with two intervening letters (choaolcte-CHOCOLATE). Results showed that the magnitude of the transposed-letter priming effect – relative to the appropriate control condition – was greater when the transposition involved adjacent letters than when it i…

Does letter position coding depend on consonant/vowel status? Evidence with the masked priming technique

2008

Recently, a number of input coding schemes (e.g., SOLAR model, SERIOL model, open-bigram model, overlap model) have been proposed that capture the transposed-letter priming effect (i.e., faster response times for jugde-JUDGE than for jupte-JUDGE). In their current version, these coding schemes do not assume any processing differences between vowels and consonants. However, in a lexical decision task, Perea and Lupker (2004, JML; Lupker, Perea, & Davis, 2008, L&CP) reported that transposed-letter priming effects occurred for consonant transpositions but not for vowel transpositions. This finding poses a challenge for these recently proposed coding schemes. Here, we report four masked priming…

Does conal prime CANAL more than cinal? Masked phonological priming effects in Spanish with the lexical decision task.

2005

Evidence for an early involvement of phonology in word identification usually relies on the comparison between a target word preceded by a homophonic prime and an orthographic control (rait-RATE vs. raut-RATE). This comparison rests on the assumption that the two control primes are equally orthographically similar to the target. Here, we tested for phonological effects with a masked priming paradigm in which orthographic similarity between priming conditions was perfectly controlled at the letter level and in which identification of the prime was virtually at chance for both stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) (66 and 50 msec). In the key prime-target pairs, each prime differed from the targ…

Sequential Effects of Phonological Priming in Visual Word Recognition

2005

International audience; Two masked priming experiments were conducted to examine phonological priming of bisyllabic words in French, and in particular, whether it operates sequentially or in parallel. Bisyllabic target words were primed by pseudowords that shared either the first or the second phonological syllable of the target. Overlap of the first syllable only-not the second-produced facilitation in both the lexical decision and the naming tasks. These findings suggest that, for polysyllabic words, phonological codes are computed sequentially during silent reading and reading aloud.

Does Tonal Information Affect the Early Stages of Visual-Word Processing in Thai?

2014

Thai offers a unique opportunity to investigate the role of lexical tone processing during visual-word recognition, as tone is explicitly expressed in its script. In order to investigate the contribution of tone at the orthographic/phonological level during the early stages of word processing in Thai, we conducted a masked priming experiment—using both lexical decision and word naming tasks. For a given target word (e.g., ห้อง/hᴐ:ŋ2/, room), five priming conditions were created: (a) identity (e.g., ห้อง/hᴐ:ŋ2/), (b) same initial consonant, but with a different tone marker (e.g., ห่อง/hᴐ:ŋ1/), (c) different initial consonant, but with the same tone marker (e.g., ศ้อง/sᴐ:ŋ2/), (d) orthograph…

Does Top-Down Feedback Modulate the Encoding of Orthographic Representations During Visual-Word Recognition?

2016

Abstract. In masked priming lexical decision experiments, there is a matched-case identity advantage for nonwords, but not for words (e.g., ERTAR-ERTAR <  ertar-ERTAR; ALTAR-ALTAR = altar-ALTAR). This dissociation has been interpreted in terms of feedback from higher levels of processing during orthographic encoding. Here, we examined whether a matched-case identity advantage also occurs for words when top-down feedback is minimized. We employed a task that taps prelexical orthographic processes: the masked prime same-different task. For “same” trials, results showed faster response times for targets when preceded by a briefly presented matched-case identity prime than when preceded by …