Figure 1.

Wide- and narrow-band spectrograms of various versions of the phrase “buying some” extracted from a male speaker uttering the sentence “They’re buying some bread.” The top row shows the original speech, followed by examples of the processing used in experiment 1, all based on three-channel sine or noise vocoders with two different envelope smoothing cut-off frequencies (30 and 300 Hz). Hence condition 3s300 refers to a three-channel sine vocoder with an envelope cutoff frequency of 300 Hz. The 30 Hz cutoff was chosen to be significantly below the fundamental frequency (F0) of the talker, and the 300 Hz cutoff chosen to be significantly above. The F0 contour of the utterance can be seen at lower right (narrow-band spectrograms of 3n30 and 3n300 stimuli are visually indistinguishable).