| Summary: | Purpose: The purpose of the current study was to determine the effects of vowel identity and temporal onset asynchrony on identification of vowels overlapped in time. Method: Fourteen listeners with normal hearing, with a mean age of 24 years, participated. The listeners were asked to identify both of a pair of 200 ms vowels (referred to as double vowels) presented either simultaneously or with a temporal asynchrony ranging from 25 ms to 150 ms in 25 ms steps. The stimuli were synthetic steady-state vowels /i æ a u Đ/ arranged in seven combinations: /u i/, /æ a/, /Đ a/, /Đ æ/, /æ i/, /Đ i/, and /Đ u/. Results: Listeners' responses revealed that one vowel of a pair was identified correctly more often than the other vowel (known as vowel dominance). Vowel dominance effects were seen for 6 of the 7 vowel pairs, and there was improvement of vowel identification with increasing temporal separation between vowels for 5 of the 7 pairs. Vowel pairs with the vowel /TS/ consistently yielded improved identification with increases in temporal asynchrony. Discussion: Peripheral masking cannot explain the patterns of results of this study. A more parsimonious explanation may be perceptual anchoring. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
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