3 - Speech Perception Flashcards
Frequency
Number of wavelengths pass by point in time. Measured in Hz
Heard as pitch
Amplitude
Amount of change wave undergoes in one cycle
Heard as loudness
Fundamental frequency
Lowest frequency produced by a vibrating object
Half length, third length make overtones
Combination heard as timbre
Cochlea
Has basilar membrane covered with hair cells
Tonotopic organization from 20k - 20 Hz
Primary auditory cortex
Known as A1, superior temporal lobe that does initial processing of the input from the cochlea
Spectrogram
Chart displaying the pattern of frequencies in the speech stream and how those patterns change over time
Prosody
Fluctuations in the fundamental frequency during an utterance
Formant
Bands of high amplitude sound at certain frequencies above the fundamental frequency
Sonorant
Serves as a consonant but sometimes a vowel (m, l, etc)
Formant transition
Modification of a formant due to proceeding or following consonant provides cues for distinguishing consonants
Formant transition is chirp
Fricative
Consonant produced by constricting the air stream to create friction (f, sh, s)
Plosives
Consonant that momentarily blocks then releases the airstream (b and p, d and t, g and k)
Aspiration
Puff of air accompanying plosives
Voice onset time
Time between release of plosives consonant and beginning of vocal fold vibration
Distinguishes between bah and pah
Phonemic restoration
Filling in missing segments of the speech stream with contextually appropriate material
McGurk effect
Artificially induced illusion in which auditory information for a speech sound is combined with visual info for a second, combination makes a third
Prosodic bootstrapping hypothesis
Infants use intonation and stress patterns to infer phrase and word boundaries
Metrical segmentation strategy
Segmenting speech stream by assuming English words begin on a stressed syllable
Motor theory
People perceive speech by inferring the movements of the vocal tract that produced those sounds
Direct realism
New form of motor theory, have direct awareness of the world because the density input is sufficiently rich for us to completely recover the object of perception
