8 | Spoken word recognition Flashcards
What is the pre-lexical analysis?
The operations that are carried out on the speech input in order to organize it into useful units
What is activation?
Establishing links between the input and the stored forms of words
What is access?
Getting hold of the information about a word that is stored in the mental lexicon
How many words does a normal person approximately know?
On average a person “knows” approximately 20 - 75k words.
What are slips-of-the-ear?
Misperceptions of speech
Hard to know where on words finishes and the next start in spoken language
What is a phonetic feature?
The distinctive properties of speech sounds
Example - Voiced vs not voiced letters (stemt vs ustemt)
Example - Place of articulation
What are gating experiments?
Experiments that show that we are able to predict the final sound before it happens.
Example - in English its normal that a vowel is followed by a consonant. So a word as soon will be identifiable as this word before the /n/ is pronounced
What is the metrical segmentation strategy?
90 % of all English content words start with a stressed, first syllable, and the mind automatically expects a English word when such a syllable is heard
What is bottom up processing?
mapping from the output of pre-lexical analysis onto forms stored in the mental lexicon
word recognition is based solely on the speech signal rather than on higher-level information (e.g. context)
using only phonemes to access the lexicon
What is top-down processing?
The use of context to preselect words from a particular area of meaning
Supported by the crossmodal priming
What is the cohort model?
Once the initial sounds of a word have been heard all words in the listener’s mental lexicon that have the same initial sequence of sounds will be contacted. A word-initial cohort is set up, and as more speech input is heard, items from that cohort are eliminated.
Word recognition occurs when only one item is left in the cohort
What is selection?
Selection - deciding that we’ve heard a word-form X rather than Y
As more phonemes are heard, non-matching candidates are eliminated or decrease in activation. Process continues until the recognition point (RP).
What is the deviation point?
The point where the nonsense word diverges from known words is called the deviation point.
What is recognized faster? Isolated words or words in context?
Words in context are recognised more quickly than isolated words
What is the recency effect?
Words that have been heard recently have a higher chance of being activated again over words that has not been used
