Effects of randomizing signal level and duration on temporal gap detection.

Although discriminable changes in stimulus energy or overall duration may accompany the silent temporal gap, there is little evidence that these extraneous cues confound the measurement of temporal gap detection threshold. In this report we show that (1) under conditions where gap detection thresholds are large in relation to the duration of the standard, extraneous cues may confound gap detection leading to underestimates of the true threshold, and (2) randomization of overall stimulus level and duration can successfully remove confounding energy and duration cues without distracting the listener's attention from the temporal-gap cue.