The role of context in the perception of environmental sounds

Past work has shown facilitatory effect of semantic context on the perception of speech. The present study investigated context effects in another large class of common meaningful sounds - environmental sounds. Sounds were arranged into sequences of five sounds designed to be either likely or not to have occurred together in a familiar auditory scene. After hearing each sequence, young adult normal-hearing listeners were instructed to first rate the coherence of each sequence and, next, label and order each sound by selecting from among 20 labels. Rating of contextual coherence of environmental sound sequences confirmed the initial distinction between sequence types. In the contextually coherent sound sequences, listeners were significantly more accurate in identifying sound labels and placing sounds in the correct presentation order. For both sequence types, there was a significant effect of sounds' temporal position in the sequence with best performance for the sounds that occurred in the beginning or t...