The Deception of the Thrush

wow....this is funky. I've been exploring various possibilities for the research line that may end up leading to my master's work (part-way down the road to the ph.d.) and one thing that's been studied some in our lab is perceptual learning of phonemic information. So I heard a talk by this one guy while I was in Minneapolis who was doing some work with "noise-vocoded" speech. He has a website with some samples, it's kind of fun, mostly for the sound bytes (though if you're a nerd like me you might enjoy the science of it as well). Anyway here's the page: http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/~matt.davis/vocode/ Try the noisy sentences before you listen to the clear versions; it's more fun that way. Sentence A is particularly hard...keep in mind that they were originally recorded with a British voice.