Confrontation naming of environmental sounds

The development of a set of everyday, nonverbal, digitized sounds for use i n auditory confrontation naming applications is described. Normative data a re reported for 130 sounds of varying lengths representing a wide variety o f acoustic events such as sounds produced by animals, people, musical instr uments, tools, signals, and liquids. In Study 1, criteria for scoring namin g accuracy were developed and rating data were gathered on degree of confid ence in sound identification and the perceived familiarity, complexity, and pleasantness of the sounds. In Study 2, the previously developed criteria for scoring naming accuracy were applied to the naming responses of a new s ample of subjects, and oral naming times were measured. In Study 3 data wer e gathered on how subjects categorized the sounds: In the first categorizat ion task - free classification - subjects generated category descriptions f or the sounds; in the second task - constrained classification - a differen t sample of subjects selected the most appropriate category label for each sound from a list of 27 labels generated in the first task. Tables are prov ided in which the 120 stimuli are sorted by familiarity, complexity, pleasa ntness, duration, naming accuracy, speed of identification, and category pl acement. The .WAV sound files are freely available to researchers and clini cians via a sound archive on the World Wide Web; the URL is http://www.cofc .edu/similar to marcellm/confront.htm.