ABSTRACT
Although there are many sound sources in the auditory environment, we are able to hear these sounds separately. The sounds are correctly categorised and matched to memory to allow us to recognise what the object is or the source that produced them. We usually think of visual objects, but we can hear auditory objects too. The sound we recognise as barking indicates a dog; another sound may be recognised as an engine. Particular properties of the nature of the sound will allow us to recognise if we are listening to a small dog-we may call this sound ‘yapping’ as opposed to the sound of a larger dog, which we may categorise as ‘woofing’. Likewise, depending on the properties of the engine sound, we may identify the engine as belonging to a car or a lorry. Clearly, in the same way that visual object descriptions can access memory representations of visual objects, auditory descriptions can also be matched to the memory representations that include the auditory properties of objects, including the sounds that make up speech.
