Figure 1: Concept of “temporal grain” to account for distinct perceptual quality of successive acoustic signals depending on time intervals. The signals are pulse train (A), a pair of pure tones with different frequencies (B) and plosive consonant-vowel syllables (/ta/ and /da/; C).The interval between the components is depicted at the left of the waveform. Upper trace: if the succeeding component(s) does NOT fall in the temporal grain (green sphere) which was triggered by the preceding component, individual components are perceptually resolved as discrete events. Lower trace: if different components fall in the same temporal grain, they will be perceptually merged together.