Abstract
It was hypothesized that expectation (instructional set) influences the perceived tempo of tone-silence sequences, and that this perception is also affected by the degree to which the perceivers are extraverted. Twenty-two university undergraduates were asked to judge the rates of 10 tone-silence sequences, which were transformations of actual speech samples. The subjects were divided into two groups, one of which was informed about the fact that the sequences were transformations, and the other of which was not told anything about the sequences. After completing their judgments about the sequences, the participants were asked to complete the Eysenck Extraversion scale. Contrary to the hypothesis, the analyses provided no evidence that the perceived rates of the informed participants were different from those of the uninformed participants, but they did indicate that (1) the perceived rates of the sequences were closely related to the tempos (words per minute) of the speech samples from which the sequences were derived, and (2) extraverts judged the rates of the sequences to be faster than did introverts. Implications for the “modular” theory of acoustic perception are discussed.
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The authors are indebted to the Language Center and to the Academic Computing Center of the University of Maryland (Baltimore County) for making their facilities and time so readily available. They are also grateful to David Moore, who served as the experimenter in the study, and to Terri Harold, who edited the final draft of the paper. This paper was presented as a poster at the first meeting of the American Psychological Society (Alexandria, VA, June 1989).
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Feldstein, S., Crown, C.L. & Jaffe, J. Expectation and extraversion: Influencing the perceived rate of tone-silence sequences. Bull. Psychon. Soc. 29, 395–398 (1991). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03333952
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03333952