Auditory sentences used for cross-modal activation

This page describes and makes available for download the stimuli used in the studies:

• GK Aguirre, OH Butt, R Datta, AJ Roman, A Sumaroka, SB Schwartz, AV Cideciyan, SG Jacobson. Post-Retinal Structure and Function in Severe Congenital Photoreceptor Blindness Caused by Mutations in the GUCY2D Gene. IOVS. In Press.
• GK Aguirre, R Datta, NC Benson, S Prasad, SG Jacobson, AV Cideciyan, H Bridge, KE Watkins, OH Butt, AS Dain, L Brandes. Patterns of individual variation in visual pathway structure and function in the sighted and blind. PloS one. 2016 Nov 3;11(11):e0164677.

Please refer any questions to aguirreg@mail.med.upenn.edu.

For the purpose of evoking cross-modal responses in the occipital cortex of blind participants, we have produced a set of auditory sentence stimuli. The sentences correspond to different categories of sensory information, as they were initially designed to test hypotheses regarding differential representation of semantic information.

The stimulus corpus is composed of 150 sentences, with 50 each from the sensory categories of tactile, auditory, and visual. Within each category, 37 sentences are “plausible”, and 13 sentences “implausible”.

All the sentences are constructed as:

or

An initial pool of 352 candidate sentences were constructed. The candidate stimuli were rated by 20 sighted control participants, each of whom judged each visually presented sentence as “plausible or implausible”, and then assigned the sentence to a sensory category (tactile, auditory, or visual). The stimuli were presented in a different random order for each subject. The sentences with the highest inter-rater reliability were selected. The instructions to the subject were:

First, for each phrase, please judge if it could be a plausible description of a real thing or event (respond TRUE),
or if it is something fantastic or impossible (respond FALSE).

Next, for each phrase, please judge if it is something that would be experienced most by, touch, sound, or sight.

Word frequency ratings for the nouns and adjectives composing the stimuli sentences in each sensory category were matched. We obtained the Kucera-Francis written frequency score for each noun and adjective. The final group of stimulus sentences in each semantic category have matched K-F frequency distributions for both nouns and adjectives, without a statistically significant difference in word frequency between groups (Kruskal-Wallis test, p = 0.65). A table of K-F frequencies for the stimuli is available.

The stimulus sentences were recorded using Microsoft Sound Recorder v 5.1 (PCM 22.06KHz, 16 bit, mono). All sentences were spoken by the same female voice. We used WavePad v.3.05 (NCH Swift Sound) to normalize each stimulus to the maximum auditory level and apply auto-spectral subtraction to voice. Fifty control stimuli were created by recording sentences played in reverse. In addition, the white noise stimulus was created with this software.

WAV formatted recordings of the stimuli may be downloaded from the public file repository for the lab:

For the presentation of the stimuli as part of “Protocol 2” of the BlindnessNOS project, Rich Zorger from the VRC wrote custom software to present the stimuli.

Auditory plausible (37)
The alarm is blaring.
The baby is crying.
The bear is growling.
The bee is buzzing.
The bird is singing.
The bush is rustling.
The car is humming.
The cat is hissing.
The cave is echoing.
The chain is rattling.
The chick is chirping.
The child is screaming.
The cricket is chirping.
The dog is barking.
The door is banging.
The dove is singing.
The duck is quacking.
The elephant is trumpeting.
The gate is banging.
The gun is loud.
The hall is quiet.
The hammer is pounding.
The house is noisy.
The man is whistling.
The plane is roaring.
The radio is loud.
The rain is pounding.
The room is silent.
The rooster is calling.
The snake is hissing.
The storm is rumbling.
The tiger is roaring.
The toilet is flushing.
The truck is rattling.
The valley is silent.
The violin is resonant.
The wind is howling.

Auditory implausible (13)
The bear is flushing.
The creek is grunting.
The duck is drumming.
The fan is barking.
The foot is rambling.
The gun is sucking.
The ice is digging.
The phone is storming.
The piano is drilling.
The plane is weeping.
The room is sucking.
The tiger is blasting.
The zoo is drilling.

Tactile plausible (37)
The baby is cuddly.
The bed is silky.
The bomb is heavy.
The brake is stuck.
The bush is prickly.
The carrot is moist.
The cave is wet.
The chick is soft.
The child is warm.
The cloth is velvety.
The coffee is hot.
The elephant is leathery.
The floor is freezing.
The flute is oily.
The foot is numb.
The frog is bumpy.
The glass is cool.
The ground is soggy.
The gun is weighty.
The hammer is heavy.
The house is cold.
The ice is numbing.
The light is hot.
The room is cool.
The rooster is soft.
The shirt is itchy.
The snake is leathery.
The snow is powdery.
The soda is cold.
The tea is warm.
The throat is dry.
The train is chilly.
The tree is smooth.
The valley is humid.
The wave is wet.
The wind is stinging.
The zoo is humid.

Tactile implausible (13)
The alarm is shaggy.
The banjo is limp.
The bat is misty.
The brake is shaggy.
The branch is spongy.
The coffee is cuddly.
The cricket is soggy.
The dove is elastic.
The gate is puffy.
The horn is foamy.
The light is flaky.
The pig is stringy.
The wheel is spongy.

Visual plausible (37)
The banjo is plain.
The bat is tiny.
The bear is huge.
The bed is neat.
The bee is flying.
The bird is flying.
The boat is shining.
The bomb is silver.
The bridge is golden.
The car is orange.
The cat is spotted.
The chain is locked.
The chick is yellow.
The clock is hanging.
The dog is tiny.
The door is cracked.
The duck is ugly.
The elephant is huge.
The fan is spinning.
The foot is ugly.
The frog is spotted.
The hall is dim.
The horn is bent.
The ice is melting.
The keyboard is dirty.
The man is tall.
The piano is antique.
The pie is steaming.
The plane is enormous.
The radio is pink.
The television is massive.
The throat is pink.
The train is enormous.
The tree is healthy.
The truck is dirty.
The wave is towering.
The wheel is rolling.

Visual implausible (13)
The machine is drizzly.
The ground is petite.
The wave is lumpy.
The tree is cloudy.
The mouse is wavy.
The frog is cloudy.
The cloth is stout.
The flag is bald.
The throat is murky.
The snake is dreary.
The broom is dreary.
The chick is rusty.
The toilet is steep.