Abstract
Twelve male listeners categorized 54 synthetic vowel stimuli that varied in second and third formant frequency on a Bark scale into the American English vowel categories /I/, /℧/, and /зι/. A neuropsychologically plausible model of categorization in the visual domain, the Striatal Pattern Classifier (SPC; Ashby & Waldron, 1999), is generalized to the auditory domain and applied separately to the data from each observer. Performance of the SPC is compared with that of the successful Normal A Posteriori Probability model (NAPP; Nearey, 1990; Nearey & Hogan, 1986) of auditory categorization. A version of the SPC that assumed piece-wise linear response region partitions provided a better account of the data than the SPC that assumed linear partitions, and was indistinguishable from a version that assumed quadratic response region partitions. A version of the NAPP model that assumed nonlinear response regions was superior to the NAPP model with linear partitions. The best fitting SPC provided a good account of each observer's data but was outperformed by the best fitting NAPP model. Implications for bridging the gap between the domains of visual and auditory categorization are discussed.
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This research was supported in part by a National Science Foundation Grant SBR-9796206 and by Research Grant 5 R01 MH59196-03 from the National Institute of Mental Health, National Institutes of Health, to W.T.M., and by Research Grant 5 R01 DC00427-11 from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, National Institutes of Health, to R.L.D.
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Maddox, W.T., Molis, M.R. & Diehl, R.L. Generalizing a neuropsychological model of visual categorization to auditory categorization of vowels. Perception & Psychophysics 64, 584–597 (2002). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03194728
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03194728