Consultation des notices

The literature on the perception of environmental sounds often postulates that these sounds are perceptually organized according to their cause. In a previous study, we found experimental results consistent with this assumption by showing that, in the case of identifiable sounds and non‐expert listeners, main categories of liquids, gases, electrical devices, and solids appear. We report here a study specifically exploring this latter category. Participants were required to categorize a set of sounds according to the actions causing the sound and to describe the resulting categories. We analyze the classifications with a specific hierarchal cluster analysis producing two dendrograms. The second dendrogram is used to highlight a possible secondary categorization that may add to the primary categorization. Therefore, this technique allows taking into account the multiple types of similarity that might occur in a categorization task. This statistical analysis of the classifications was complemented by a linguistic analysis of the descriptions of the categories (ALCESTE and LEXICO). This analysis shows two main categories of descriptions: those describing several objects in interaction and those describing modifications of an object. Eventually, we discuss how hierarchical cluster and linguistic analyses complement to provide a portrait of the perceptive categorization of sounds of solids.