AUDL 4007   January 2012

Auditory perception

Speech, Hearing and Phonetic Sciences
Division of Psychology & Language Sciences, UCL
Chandler House
2 Wakefield Street
London WC1N 1PF


This unit will provide advanced training in aspects of auditory perception that are particularly relevant to understanding both normal and impaired auditory function. An emphasis will be placed on the fundamental aspects of hearing such as frequency analysis, temporal analysis, pitch perception, intensity perception and binaural processing.
Course Structure: The course is run in the second term only, on Thursday afternoons, starting on 13 January 2011. There is no meeting on 17 February due to it being reading week. The course comprises a mixture of lectures, demonstrations, laboratory sessions and tutorials.

Venue and scheduling: All sessions start at 14:00 in Chandler House. The lectures will be in Room B01. We will typically move to B07 (the teaching laboratory) after the lecture.

Staff
Stuart Rosen 020 7679 7404 stuart@phon.ucl.ac.uk course organiser
Steve Nevard 020 7679 3156 steve@phon.ucl.ac.uk experimental officer
Dave Cushing 020 7679 7400 dave@phon.ucl.ac.uk laboratory technician


Main text: Plack C. (2005) The Sense of Hearing. Erlbaum.

Supplementary Reading
  • BCJ Moore (ed) (1986) Frequency Selectivity in Hearing. London: Academic Press. Does what it says on the tin, with thorough accounts of the psychoacoustics of frequency selectivity, plus more.
  • S Gelfand (2004) Hearing: An Introduction to Psychological and Physiological Acoustics, Fourth Edition, Revised and Expanded. A nearly complete resource for anatomy, physiology and psychoacoustics. Especially good on the middle ear.
  • R Plomp (2002) The Intelligent Ear, Lawrence Erlbaum, Mahwah New Jersey. A very accessible account of hearing.
  • BCJ Moore (2003). An Introduction to the Psychology of Hearing, 5th ed. (Academic Press). A very complete guide to the literature, but at an advanced level.
  • WA Yost (2006) Fundamentals of Hearing: An Introduction, 5th ed. (Academic Press). A more elementary exposition. Particularly good on the anatomy & physiology.
  • J Schnupp, E Nelken & A King (2010) Auditory Neuroscience: Making Sense of Sound (MIT Press). A very new book with much more discussion of the neural substrates of perception, and focus on a more limited range of topics. Worth a look. There is also an extensive web site containing animations and demonstrations.
  • D Moore, P Fuchs, A Palmer, A Rees & C Plack (2010) Oxford Handbook of Auditory Science: The Ear, The Auditory Brain, Hearing


Assessment for the BSc and PLING 304
  • 2 pieces of coursework, each worth 15% of the final mark (max 1000 words each), both based on doing the work of a science journalist by summarising a chosen paper in a style suitable for a quality daily newspaper. You will received feedback on one version of this, and re-write.
  • A 2-hour written paper (70%)
You must pass the final exam to pass the course.

Assessment for the MSc
  • 1 piece of coursework (max 1000 words), again doing the work of a science journalist by summarising a chosen paper in a style suitable for a quality daily newspaper (10% of the module mark).
  • A written paper covering the material in other courses as well as this one (80% of the module mark).

Final exam

The final exam for the BSc students will take place in the main exam period. It will consist of a set of 6 essay type questions, of which you must answer 5. This allows 24 mins/question. Generally speaking, there is a straightforward question associated with one or more lecture topics, as for the exams in 2009 and 2008. The exam in 2007 was in a slightly different format.

Here are some example questions with tips for model answers.

The exam format for the MSc students will be announced later.

Course work BSc Audiology and PLING 304

Write two articles for a lay audience summarizing the crucial results of a journal article relevant to this course, in a style appropriate for a quality daily newspaper The use of graphics and diagrams is more than welcome, but is not required. Below you will find a few articles that would be appropriate, but please choose your own. You must email the .pdf first so I can assess its suitability. A good source of relevant papers can be found in the following journals, although other,more general journals, can sometimes have appropriate studies too (e.g., Nature and Science). You can gain access to these through the UCL library page http://www.ucl.ac.uk/Library/ejournal/ejtitle.shtml

  • Journal of the Acoustical Society of America in the Psychological Acoustics section. This is the pre-eminent journal in the field with a wide variety of studies concerning both normal and impaired hearing.
  • Ear & Hearing Oriented more towards clinically-relevant issues.
  • International Journal of Audiology
  • JARO (Journal of the Association for Research in Otolaryngology)
  • Hearing Research
  • Audiology & Neuro-otology
  • Attention, Perception & Psychophysics (formerly known as Perception & Psychophysics )

The following are examples of articles that would be appropriate, but please do not use these. Get an article from within last 3 years or so. Ensure that the articule you select is not a review article in which much of the work is done for you already! It must be a primary research paper, although an appropriate meta-analysis of a some clinical procedure might be OK. Read any article you propose to use beforehand to ensure that it can be explained to a lay audience! Note that you may need to read ahead of the syllabus for some topics.

  • Baker, R. J. & Rosen, S. (2002). Auditory filter nonlinearity in mild/moderate hearing impairment. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 111, 1330-1339.
  • Kong, Y. Y., Cruz, R., Jones, J. A., & Zeng, F. G. (2004). Music perception with temporal cues in acoustic and electric hearing. Ear and Hearing, 25, 173-185.
  • Musiek, F. E., Shinn, J. B., Jirsa, R., Bamiou, D. E., Baran, J. A., & Zaidan, E. (2005). GIN (Gaps-In-Noise) test performance in subjects with confirmed central auditory nervous system involvement. Ear and Hearing, 26, 608-618.
  • Neuman, A. C., Haravon, A., Sislian, N., & Waltzman, S. B. (2007). Sound-direction identification with bilateral cochlear implants. Ear and Hearing, 28, 73-82.
  • van Hoesel, R., Ramsden, R., & O'Driscoll, M. (2002). Sound-direction identification, interaural time delay discrimination, and speech intelligibility advantages in noise for a bilateral cochlear implant user. Ear and Hearing, 23, 137-149.
  • Yasin, I. & Plack, C. J. (2005). Psychophysical tuning curves at very high frequencies. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 118, 2498-2506.

Articles should be 1000 words or less. Your article should introduce the basic topic and discuss the motivation of the author(s) in doing the study, as well report the results and their implications. Ensure you use language any reasonably well-educated person could understand. Do not simply paraphrase (or outright plagiarise!) the author(s). Unlike an article in the popular press, you should have a reference list. An appropriate style can be found in this example, this one or this one, all from Nature News. Again, use the library page to access the ejournal and locate the full article by date.

You will submit your work both in hard copy and in Moodle using TurnItIn. Please also submit the article your essay was baed on to Moodle using TurnItIn as well. For the BSc Audiology and any others doing both pieces of coursework, the following deadlines are crucial .

  • 26 January: Choose a paper and email the title and the pdf to stuart@phon.ucl.ac.uk for approval
  • 2 February: Hand in essay 1 (also submitted via Moodle)
  • 9 February: Essay 1 returned with comments
  • 22 February: Hand in rewritten final version of essay 1 to be marked (also submitted via Moodle)
  • 1 March: Choose and have approved a second paper (in a different topic area) by email to stuart@phon.ucl.ac.uk
  • 15 March: Bring two hard copies (double-spaced) of essay 2 to the lab session, where fellow students will read them and give you feedback
  • 22 March: Hand in final version of essay 2 to be marked (also submitted via Moodle)

Course work MSc Audiological Science

You will fulfill the first two stages of what the BSc students do. Read the guidleines above carefully. Please submit as hard copy your essay and the paper you reported on. Due by 16 March 2012. You may submit these to Ekta Ghadvi at the Ear Institute, or in my pigeonhole at Chandler House.

Week by Week

Unless otherwise indicated, lectures will be given by Prof Stuart Rosen

Week 1: 12 January 2012: Introduction to the course, and a review of peripheral auditory physiology

Chapters 1-3 in Plack summarise the basic aspects of acoustics, signals & systems you need to be familiar with, with Chapter 4 covering the basic physiology. Schnupp et al. also cover these areas well, with a different focus and more emphasis on the physiology of the ear. Yost's chapters 6-9 on the anatomy and physiology are very clear, extensive and easy to get to grips with. Chapter 12 in the revised book Signals and Systems for Speech and Hearing, 2nd edition (provided above) gives a thorough summary of the ear as a signal processor.

Week 2: 19 January 2012: Frequency selectivity

Read Ch 5 in Plack.

Week 3: 26 January 2012: Intensity and loudness

Read Ch 6 in Plack.

Week 4: 2 February 2012: Temporal resolution

Read Ch 8 in Plack.

Week 5: 9 February 2012: Pitch perception (Dr A Faulkner)

Read Ch 7 in Plack and Ch 3 in Schnupp et al.

Week 6: 23 February 2012: Envelope and Temporal Fine Structure (TFS) & Psychoacoustics of hearing impairment

For more on the psychoacoustics of hearing impairment, read this and this and this. Also available in a more compact format with 2 journal pages per printed page: This and this and this. This is a really excellent summary about auditory compression and hearing loss.

Week 7: 1 March 2012: Cochlear implants

Suggested readings
  • Chapter 8 in Schnupp et al. 'Auditory Prostheses: From the Lab to the Clinic and Back Again'
  • More than you want to know about speech processing schemes here.

Week 8: 8 March 2012: Hearing speech in noise

Read this excellent paper about energetic and informational masking.

Week 9: 15 March 2012: Auditory Scene Analysis

Read Ch 10 in Plack, and this. Ch 6 in Schnupp et al. might also be useful, and the accompanying web site has some good demonstrations.

Week 10: 22 March 2012: Binaural hearing (Prof D McAlpine)

Read Ch 9 in Plack. Ch 5 in Schnupp et al. could also be useful.

Term ends 23 March 2012


Other links to material concerning relevant topics

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