Chapter 13

Question 1

Link et al. (2003) studied the perceived meaning of listeners’ to the phrase “Let’s do lunch sometime,” based on the speaker’s inflection and emotional state. These are examples of

Answer 1

indexical characteristic

Question 2

Masakazu is a 4-month-old Japanese infant. When presented the phonemes /r/ and /l/, he will

Answer 2

be able to discriminate between these two phonemes

Question 3

The existence of phonetic boundaries

Answer 3

has been demonstrated using discrimination experiments

Question 4

Japanese children at the age of _______ can tell the difference between the /r/ sound and the /l/ sound just as well as American children.

Answer 4

6 months of age

Question 5

Watkins, using transcranial magnetic stimulation, found that motor-evoked potentials were highest when the participant

Answer 5

both heard speech sounds and watched someone else’s lips make speech sounds

Question 6

The vowel sound /ae/ (as in “had”) has

Answer 6

three formants

Question 7

The ______ is the shortest segment of speech that, if changed, changes the meaning of the word.

Answer 7

phonemes

Question 8

Spectrograms of sentences show

Answer 8

no clear pauses or breaks between words

Question 9

Top-down processing can help

Answer 9

segment acoustic signals.
recognize phonemes.
recognize words

Question 10

Rubin et al. (1976) asked participants to respond when they heard a word that started with the /b/ sound. The average response time when real words were used was ____; and ______ when non-words were used.

Answer 10

580 msec; 631 msec

Question 11

The discovery of ______ is used as support for the motor theory of speech perception.

Answer 11

audiovisual mirror neurons

Question 12

A fan of science fiction television shows would be more likely to make sense of the phrase “Start Wreck In Tore Prize.” This demonstrates the importance of

Answer 12

meaning of segmentation

Question 13

A person with Wernicke’s aphasia

Answer 13

produces fluent speech, but in nonsensical “word salads.”

Question 14

A sound spectrogram is a plot of ______________ as a function of _____________, with darker areas representing greater intensity.

Answer 14

frequency; time

Question 15

Which of the following can be considered an articulator?

Answer 15

the soft palate

Question 16

Which of the following can be considered an articulator?

Answer 16

the soft palate

Question 17

Damage to Broca’s area in the frontal lobe results in difficulty

Answer 17

in speaking

Question 18

If a listener is asked to pay attention to speech provided by familiar voices, the _____ is activated, as shown by fMRI studies.

Answer 18

both FFA and STS

Question 19

There are _____ phonemes for vowel sounds in the English language.

Answer 19

13

Question 20

Miller and Isard presented listeners with grammatical sentences (“Gadgets simplify work around the house”); ungrammatical word strings (“Between gadgets highways passengers the steal”), and anomalous sentences (“Gadgets kill passengers from the eyes”). The results showed that the listener’s ability to accurately report the phrase was

Answer 20

highest for the grammatical condition, followed by anomalous, and then ungrammatical

Question 21

Computer speech recognition is

Answer 21

worse than human speech recognition

Question 22

Saffron et al. (1996) found that the ability to use transitional probabilities to segment sounds develops around

Answer 22

8 months old

Question 23

Using fMRI, Belin et al., (2000) were able to reveal that, in humans, the superior temporal sulcus (STS) is

Answer 23

activated more for human voices than for other sounds

Question 24

Saffron et al. (1996) found that 8-month-old infants listened to ______ test stimuli longer, providing evidence that infants are capable of __________ learning.

Answer 24

part word; statistical

Question 25

The McGurk effect is most similar to which of the following performers?

Answer 25

ventriloquists

Question 26

Warren showed that when a cough sound replaced the sound of the first /s/ in the word “legislatures,” listeners reported hearing

Answer 26

the cough and the /s/ sound, but the cough position was not correctly identified

Question 27

The consonant sound “____” is produced by placing your bottom lip against your upper front teeth and then pushing the air between the lips and the teeth.

Answer 27

f

Question 28

Micelli et al. (1980) found that brain damage to the parietal lobe caused the patient to have difficulty discriminating between syllables. Micelli et al found that

Answer 28

some of these patients could still understand words

Question 29

The research by Rivera-Gaxiola on the effect of Spanish speech sounds on the electrical potentials of American infants shows that speech perception involves

Answer 29

experience-dependent plasticity

Question 30

Listening to someone speak a foreign language you are not familiar with can lead to

Answer 30

the segmentation problem

Question 31

The problem of variability from the way different people speak can be demonstrated by

Answer 31

the pitch differences in different people’s voices.
the different accents of different speakers.
the speed at which the speaker talks.

Question 32

The problem of variability from the way different people speak can be demonstrated by

Answer 32

the pitch differences in different people’s voices.
the different accents of different speakers.
the speed at which the speaker talks.

Question 33

Humans perceive the sound /b/ to be the same, even when the coarticulation of the sound is be different. This phenomenon is an example of

Answer 33

perceptual constancy

Question 34

Your ability to read the sentence HVANCDY is used as an example of the importance of

Answer 34

top-down processing

Question 35

The ubiquitous “Whazzup!” is a sloppy pronunciation of “What’s up?” The spectrograms of each of these two spoken phrases would indicate

Answer 35

Major differences between the two, especially in the middle of the spectrograms

Question 36

Jessica looks at Ashlee on a videotape. Ashlee’s lips are making the movement for the sound /ga-ga/, but the sound that is actually presented is the acoustic signal for /ba-ba/. What sound is Jessica most likely to report hearing?

Answer 36

/da-da/

Question 37

Brain scanning research has shown that the ________ is responsible for identifying sounds, and the _____ is responsible for locating sounds.

Answer 37

“What” (ventral) stream; “where” (dorsal) stream

Question 38

The joke in the textbook with the punch line ‘yeah, right” is used as an example of

Answer 38

Sarcasm as a type of indexical characteristics

Question 39

When you say “bat” and “boot,” the /b/ sound is articulated differently. This is an example of

Answer 39

coarticulation

Question 40

The voice onset time (VOT) for the sound /da/ is 17 ms, and the VOT for the sound /ta/ is 91 msec. When a computer produces a sound with a VOT of 65 msec, listeners are likely to report hearing

Answer 40

the /ta/ sound

Question 41

The ability to categorize speech sounds is found in infants as young as

Answer 41

one month old

Question 42

Palmeri et al. (1993) had participants listen to a word list that was spoken by (1) the same speaker, or (2) different speakers. In a subsequent recognition memory test, participants were

Answer 42

More accurate when one speaker said all of the words