Frequency judgements of sounds and words

Rowe, W. Gordon (1977) Frequency judgements of sounds and words. Masters thesis, Memorial University of Newfoundland.

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Abstract

Familar sounds and their spoken names were compared in a frequency judgement paradigm. In Experiment 1, subjects heard a long list of either sounds or words with individual items occurring 0, 1, 2, 4, or 6 times followed by an unexpected frequency judgement test. Sounds did not differ from words on mean judged frequency but did display lower within-subject variability than words as well as superior frequency judgement accuracy. It was suggested that the differences found may reflect differential processing within speech and nonspeech auditory memory systems. In Experiment 2, subjects heard a single list containing both sounds and their spoken names but were unexpectedly tested on only sounds or words. In the sounds list, individual sounds occurred 0, 2, 4, or 6 times while their spoken names occurred once for one half and 6 times for the other half of the sounds at each level of presented frequency. Similarly, the worlds were presented 0, 2, 4, or 6 times while their corresponding sounds occurred 1 or 6 times. The presence of words in the sounds list and sounds in the word list caused subjects to give inflated estimates of the number of times the sounds or words had actually occurred. As hypothesized, this distortion in judged frequency was greater for words than for sounds. This latter result was interpreted in terms of an extension to the auditory modality of Paivio's (197l) dual-çoding framework, stressing the existence of dual verbal and nonverbal (imaginal) auditory processing systems for sounds and words.

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