When you use this multimedia exhibit…you’ll hear an audio file of people talking, edited with interruptions of silence, soft noise or loud noise.
You need to work out which sentence is easiest to understand: the sentence with silent gaps, soft gaps or loud gaps.
If you’re watching a play and someone coughs during a crucial moment, it’s annoying, but your brain usually edits pieces together, so you perceive hearing the word that was masked by the noise. Your brain seems to ‘fill’ in the gaps as though nothing happened.
When your brain compensates for bad quality audio information like this, it is called auditory induction, or in the case of human speech, phonemic restoration.
...but your brain is quite skilled at making sense of bad quality speech.
Surprisingly, most people find speech that’s interrupted by loud noise easier to understand than speech that’s interrupted by soft noise or silence.
In this exhibit, the audio file says:
We edited the audio files with interruptions of loud noise, soft noise and silence, each lasting 100 milliseconds, (similar to work done by Dr Makio Kashino).
When your brain anticipates it’s about to hear and process language, it will make assumptions about the patterns of sounds and words being spoken, such as phonemes and morphemes and how the words are arranged together (grammatical rules).
Morphemes are the smallest possible words or prefixes that carry meaning and they can also be broken down into phonemes.
‘Dress’ is a morpheme word, while ‘un-’ is a morpheme prefix. ‘Dress’ can mean ‘put on clothing’, but if you add the prefix ‘un-’, it becomes ‘undress’ which changes the meaning to ‘take off clothing’.
Phonemes are the smallest significant sound units in language, but they’re not necessarily syllables. The English language has about 40 phonemes, and they allow you to distinguish between words, such as the difference between ‘lap’ and ‘rap’.