Speech perception is fast, really fast. It has been demonstrated that the human ear and mind can decode around 20 phonemes per second. That is about 20 speech sounds!

However, when it comes to decoding non-speech sounds such as buzzes, clicks and whistles, the mind has a much greater difficulty.

Try it yourself

Here is a sequence of buzzes, boinks, whistles and clicks presented at around 3 sounds per second. Listen to the sequence and see if you can write the order down.

 

Now listen to a sequence of speech sounds (phonemes) presented at around 5 sounds per second, that’s faster than above. The speech sounds are all sounds that you could find in the English language. Listen to this sequence and see if you can write it down

 

You should have found the speech sounds easier to segment and store in memory compared to the non-speech sounds. Our minds seem to be tuned to processing speech sounds much more efficiently than non-speech sounds, especially if they are presented in our own language.

 

Answers: BUZZ BOINK CLICK BUZZ WHISTLE BOINK BUZZ CLICK CLICK BOINK WHISTLE CLICK BUZZ BOINK BOINK WHISTLE CLICK BOINK WHISTLE BUZZ

be ban di po ti marga fits