Study Guide for Chapter 11

1.         What is threshold intensity and how is it determined (briefly)?

2.         How is an audibility function curve created and what does it depict? At what frequency do tones require the least intensity to be heard?

3.         How many Americans suffer some loss of hearing and how many are profoundly deaf? How does loss of hearing compare with other physical disabilities (in terms of general incidence)?

4.         What is the definition of total deafness? What does it mean to be hearing-impaired? In what circumstance(s) might one term be preferred over the other?

5.         What is the difference between conduction loss and sensory/neural loss of hearing?

6.         What are the most common causes of conduction hearing loss?

7.         What is otitis media and who is most likely to develop this condition?

8.         What is otosclerosis and who is most likely to develop this condition? How might it be treated?

9.         What are factors that can produce sensory/neural hearing loss? Which of these factors is most common?

10.       In what ways do rock concerts affect hearing (and for whom)?

11.       What causes a temporary threshold shift?

12.       What are some of the drugs that commonly produce hearing loss?

13.       In general, what is the region of the sound spectrum in which human speech falls (i.e. the frequency range in Hz)?

14.       How does a hearing aid serve to improve auditory perception?

15.       How effectively and at what frequencies does a hearing aid function?

16.       How does a cochlear implant work and how effective are they?

17.       What is auditory masking?

18.       What is broadband noise? How do you create bandpass noise from broadband noise? What is the center frequency? What is the importance of the critical band?

19.       What is the perceptual equivalent of the intensity of a sound?

20.       What is loudness matching?

21.       How is magnitude estimation applied to the measurement of the perception of loudness (you might want to look at the appendix for this)?

22.       How is loudness determined by the nervous system?

23.       What is a discrimination threshold?

24.       What is a profile analysis and what kind of information does it provide?

25.       What is pitch?

26.       What is a fundamental frequency?

27.       What do your authors mean when they say that pitch and frequency are not synonymous?

28.       How does perception of a missing fundamental contribute to understanding the dissociation of pitch and frequency?

29.       What is timbre? What do the fundamental frequency and overtones tell us about a sound and its source?

30.       Again you should be able to apply temporal and place theories to pitch perception.

31.       What is an auditory image and how does such an “image” contribute to our perception and identification of sounds?

32.       Why is it important that the auditory stream be constructed of common spectral content? What about a common time course?

33.       Why do newer model automobile horns honk at F-sharp and A-sharp?

34.       In what ways does sound localization contribute to the identification of the source of a sound? (In other words, how do we use “where” a sound is to identify “what” the sound is?)

35.       What is the cone of confusion, and what does it indicate about sound localization using interaural intensity differences and interaural time differences?

36.       In what ways do we minimize mislocalization errors?

37.       What is the cocktail party effect?

38.       What is auditory looming?

You should be able to consider the various ideas in this chapter in the context of the Gestalt laws. For example, the concepts of melody, speech, the auditory stream and its timing, and so forth.