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Poster A in Poster Session A: Tuesday, August 4, 9:30 – 11:15 am, Kimmel Center, Shorin & Rosenthal Rooms

When the Whole Shapes the Parts: Local-Global Interactions in Auditory Perception

Berfin Bastug¹, Yue Sun², Erich Schroger³, David Poeppel⁴; ¹Universität Leipzig, ²Goethe University Frankfurt, ³Leipzig University, ⁴New York University

Presenter: Berfin Bastug

How does perceiving a unified whole affect our ability to track its individual parts? This question is fundamental to understanding perceptual organization, yet remains underexplored in auditory perception. Sine-wave speech offers a unique window into this problem: the same impoverished acoustic signal can be perceived as disconnected whistles or as intelligible speech, depending on prior knowledge. We discretized sine-wave speech into 50 ms tone pips and asked whether recognizing a global word form compromises sensitivity to local acoustic details. In a between-subjects design, participants judged which probe matched a reference stimulus. Critically, when one reference track was time-reversed, which contrasted local accuracy against global consistency, participants without linguistic context managed to track local elements, whereas those who perceived the stimulus as speech performed near chance. These findings demonstrate that top-down linguistic organization, while enabling the perception of a meaningful whole, comes at a cost: local sensory fidelity is sacrificed in favor of global coherence.

Topic Area: Auditory, Speech & Language Processing