The “identification” and “discrimination” of components of elementary auditory displays are here differentiated in terms of the relative contiguity between the unknown signal and the set of possible signals that may be chosen. Listeners attempted to match arbitrary designations to sound levels of a tone under three conditions of relative contiguity between the unknown sound level and the set of possible sound levels. Significant improvements in matching are associated with increasing contiguity, especially under finely subdivided conditions encompassing a wide range of sound levels.