Auditory grammar

Auditory streams are considered basic units of auditory percepts, and an auditory stream is a concatenation of auditory events and silences. In our recent book, we proposed a theoretical framework in which auditory units equal to or smaller than auditory events, i.e., auditory subevents, are integrated linearly to form auditory streams. A simple grammar, Auditory Grammar, was introduced to avoid nonsense chains of subevents, e.g., a silence succeeded immediately by an offset (a termination); a silence represents a state without a sound, and to put an offset, i.e., the end of a sound, immediately after that should be prohibited as ungrammatical. By assuming a few gestalt principles including the proximity principle and this grammar, we are able to interpret or reinterpret some auditory phenomena from a unified viewpoint, such as the gap transfer illusion, the split-off phenomenon, the auditory continuity effect, and perceptual extraction of a melody in a very reverberant room.