Production of environmental sounds

Environmental sounds, which included recordings of vacuum cleaners and laundry machines, were taken from a professional sound effects library. Audio editing software (Audacity) was used to extract brief clips from these environmental sound samples that were identical in duration to the vocal stimuli used in the study (956 msec). These clips were ramped and damped (10 msec) to avoid generating click-like sounds at the onset and offset of the sound, and then they were equated to the vocal stimuli for RMS energy.