4. Voice and Speech Processing Flashcards
Can infer gender, size, age, mood/emotions, trustworthiness from this
Voice
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
a voice sounded aggressive, attractive, competent, confident etc
- shows voices associated with social traits
The principle component social traits from voices across both genders:
trustworthiness and dominance
Explain what pitch, intensity and tempo mean in terms of voices when making up the acoustic profiles
- Pitch: how high or low. Higher frequency = higher voice
- intensity: high amplitude waves = louder voice
- tempo: speed of the voice
Banse and Scherer found that some emotions, aside from __ and __, are understood cross culturally. true or false
- fear, joy
- true
Belin and colleagues used fMRI and found that voices caused bilateral activation of which brain regions compared to non-vocal
temporal brain regions
What is neural adaptation?
decrease in how much a sensory system responds over time to a constant stimulus
What design is this: stimuli repeated according to speaker identity (same person repeating ‘ba’) or repeated syllable (diff people saying ‘ba’)
Carry over design
role of anterior temporal lobe in voice processing
processes the identity of the voice
Selectively responds to angry speech compared to neutral speech or non-vocal sounds
The right temporal voice area (TVA)
How has causality been inferred between voice processing and the TVAs experimentally?
apply TMS to TVA, ask Ps to recognise voices vs non-voices.
- impaired discrimination between the two compared to TMS control site
True or false, TMS to the TVA impaired discrimination of voices vs non-voices but NOT loud/quiet discrimination
TRUE
Why is speech processing hard?
have to separate phonemes and words from continuous streams with no punctuation or spaces
A1 responds equally to speech and other auditory stimuli. Where does speech begin to be processed separately?
In the left hemisphere along the what pathway in temporal lobes
Broca (patients couldnt produce speech) and Wernicke (patients couldnt comprehend speech) provided neuropsyc evidence for:
left-lateralisation of speech processing
Broca (patients couldnt produce speech) and Wernicke (patients couldnt comprehend speech) provided neuropsyc evidence for:
left-lateralisation of speech processing
what type of processing enables one to understand vocoded speech?
top down processing once you know what words they are trying to say
formed when energy distributions from real speech are divided and averaged to remove any acoustic information
Vocoded speech
fMRI research showed that intelligible speech (vocoded and normal) activate what brain regions. what does this show?
left temporal regions - speech meaning processing is left lateralised
fMRI research shows that spectrally rich speech (normal or rotated) activates which brain region?
Right temporal regions
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
The Acoustic Uncertainty Principle
Explain the Acoustic uncertainty principle:
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.
Looking at mouth movements can alter our perception of speech, due to efference copies from the motor system
The McGurk Effect
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)
TRUE - this is needed in order to understand speech
Auditory agnosia where patients can identify sounds and music, but not speech
Pure word deafness
Patients with damage to motor/mirror neurons have speech production/perception issues, T or F?
F - only when auditory signal hard to disambiguate (McGurk Effect)
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
True
In a study comparing cross cultural abilities to detect emotion from voices, what emotion was hardest to agree on for indonesian listeners?
Joy
Takes in all external stimuli. What type of processing?
Bottom up
Focuses on important or useful information only, using previous experience. What type of processing?
Top down
neuronal rhythms are aligned with the speech waveform via what two brain oscillations
- theta - modulation
- gamma - oscillation
