Illustration of the stimuli used in experiment 1.

<p>Listeners had to detect a 100-ms target (gray line) embedded in a 100-ms multitone masker (background). The masker-plus-target mixture could be preceded by five bursts of a synchronous precursor (top panel), five bursts of an asynchronous precursor (bottom panel), or silence (not shown). As indicated by the arrows, the time interval between the midpoint of the last precursor burst and the beginning of the masker-plus-target mixture was the same in the SYNCH and ASYNCH conditions.