Auditory Grammar : Organization of Speech and Nonspeech

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In order to understand the crucial role of the human auditory system in our linguistic behavior, it is important to investigate how the auditory system selects and connects perceptual elements to be organized. No systematic experiments from such a viewpoint had been conducted before the present research project. Thus, we utilized linguistic and nonlinguistic materials related to new auditory phenomena that we had discovered, such as the gap transfer illusion and the split-off effect. We made auditory demonstrations, conducted perceptual experiments, and analyzed the temporal structures of speech and rhythm production. We conducted experiments on auditory attention employing tone sequences. Furthermore, we analyzed the relationship between syllable structures and syntactic structures of languages of the world. It was revealed that auditory events in auditory organization and syllables in speech have common aspects. Thus, we confirmed our hypothesis on the perception of auditory events and auditory streams. In this hypothesis, an auditory stream is considered as a linear concatenation of auditory events and silences. More exactly, an auditory stream consists of auditory subevents, i.e.,onsets, offsets, fillings, and silences, connected to each other linearly according to simple grammar and the proximity principle, one of the Gestalt principles. Employing synthesized Mandarin speech, we showed that an onset and an offset belonging to physically different sounds can create an illusory perception of a single Mandarin syllable. This finding extends the results we had obtained employing relatively simple sounds to the linguistic domain. Recently, we are conducting computational research on how the auditory system determines and organizes cues of discrete linguistic elements in acoustic signals changing continuously in time.