8 | Spoken word recognition Flashcards
Pre-lexical analysis
The operations that are carried out on the speech input in order to organize it into useful units
Activation
Establishing links between the input and the stored forms of words
Access
Getting hold of the information about a word that is stored in the mental lexicon
Recognition
Knowing which word it is that we have heard
phoneme
the smallest unit that when changed differ in meaning
Ex.: cat vs bat
With the only difference being the sound /c/ and /b/
Slips of the ear
Misperceptions of speech
- Hard to know where on words finishes and the next
start in spoken language
Phonetic feature
The distinctive properties of speech sounds
Example - Voiced vs not voiced letters (stemt vs ustemt)
Example - Place of articulation
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
Metrical Segmentation Strategy(MSS)
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
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
Top down processing
The use of context to preselect words from a particular area of meaning
Supported by the crossmodal priming
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
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).
Deviation point
Follows the same strategy as above, but is used when trying to distinguish between real words and non-words. The point where the nonsense word diverges from known words is called the deviation point.
Lexical access
Refers to the point at which the lexically stored information becomes available
