4. Voice and Speech Processing

Question 1

Can infer gender, size, age, mood/emotions, trustworthiness from this

Answer 1

Voice

Question 2

McAleer and colleagues found that when participants rated social traits of people saying “hello” and found that people consistently agree on whether:
What does this show

Answer 2

a voice sounded aggressive, attractive, competent, confident etc
- shows voices associated with social traits

Question 3

The principle component social traits from voices across both genders:

Answer 3

trustworthiness and dominance

Question 4

Explain what pitch, intensity and tempo mean in terms of voices when making up the acoustic profiles

Answer 4

• Pitch: how high or low. Higher frequency = higher voice
• intensity: high amplitude waves = louder voice
• tempo: speed of the voice

Question 5

Banse and Scherer found that some emotions, aside from __ and __, are understood cross culturally. true or false

Answer 5

• fear, joy

- true

Question 6

Belin and colleagues used fMRI and found that voices caused bilateral activation of which brain regions compared to non-vocal

Answer 6

temporal brain regions

Question 7

What is neural adaptation?

Answer 7

decrease in how much a sensory system responds over time to a constant stimulus

Question 8

What design is this: stimuli repeated according to speaker identity (same person repeating ‘ba’) or repeated syllable (diff people saying ‘ba’)

Answer 8

Carry over design

Question 9

role of anterior temporal lobe in voice processing

Answer 9

processes the identity of the voice

Question 10

Selectively responds to angry speech compared to neutral speech or non-vocal sounds

Answer 10

The right temporal voice area (TVA)

Question 11

How has causality been inferred between voice processing and the TVAs experimentally?

Answer 11

apply TMS to TVA, ask Ps to recognise voices vs non-voices.

- impaired discrimination between the two compared to TMS control site

Question 12

True or false, TMS to the TVA impaired discrimination of voices vs non-voices but NOT loud/quiet discrimination

Answer 12

TRUE

Question 13

Why is speech processing hard?

Answer 13

have to separate phonemes and words from continuous streams with no punctuation or spaces

Question 14

A1 responds equally to speech and other auditory stimuli. Where does speech begin to be processed separately?

Answer 14

In the left hemisphere along the what pathway in temporal lobes

Question 15

Broca (patients couldnt produce speech) and Wernicke (patients couldnt comprehend speech) provided neuropsyc evidence for:

Answer 15

left-lateralisation of speech processing

Question 16

Broca (patients couldnt produce speech) and Wernicke (patients couldnt comprehend speech) provided neuropsyc evidence for:

Answer 16

left-lateralisation of speech processing

Question 17

what type of processing enables one to understand vocoded speech?

Answer 17

top down processing once you know what words they are trying to say

Question 18

formed when energy distributions from real speech are divided and averaged to remove any acoustic information

Answer 18

Vocoded speech

Question 19

fMRI research showed that intelligible speech (vocoded and normal) activate what brain regions. what does this show?

Answer 19

left temporal regions - speech meaning processing is left lateralised

Question 20

fMRI research shows that spectrally rich speech (normal or rotated) activates which brain region?

Answer 20

Right temporal regions

Question 21

This principle tries to explain why the left side of the brain is more specialised to intelligible speech, and the right for spectrally rich information

Answer 21

The Acoustic Uncertainty Principle

Question 22

Explain the Acoustic uncertainty principle:

Answer 22

In speech, temporal information is more important and spectral (pitch) is less important. This is the opposite for music. The voice areas in left are more specialised to temporal information - pausing at right places to separate words etc.

Question 23

Looking at mouth movements can alter our perception of speech, due to efference copies from the motor system

Answer 23

The McGurk Effect

Question 24

True or false, there are preferred frequencies at which motor and auditory brain waves are synchronised (4.5Hz) and this matches with words (4.5 syllables/second)

Answer 24

TRUE - this is needed in order to understand speech

Question 25

Auditory agnosia where patients can identify sounds and music, but not speech

Answer 25

Pure word deafness

Question 26

Patients with damage to motor/mirror neurons have speech production/perception issues, T or F?

Answer 26

F - only when auditory signal hard to disambiguate (McGurk Effect)

Question 27

True or false, german listeners found it easier to gauge fear, joy and sadness from a german actor’s voice than indonesian listeners in a study by Banse and Scherer 1996

Answer 27

True

Question 28

In a study comparing cross cultural abilities to detect emotion from voices, what emotion was hardest to agree on for indonesian listeners?

Answer 28

Joy

Question 29

Takes in all external stimuli. What type of processing?

Answer 29

Bottom up

Question 30

Focuses on important or useful information only, using previous experience. What type of processing?

Answer 30

Top down

Question 31

neuronal rhythms are aligned with the speech waveform via what two brain oscillations

Answer 31

• theta - modulation

- gamma - oscillation