Chapter 13 Flashcards
Acoustic Signal/Stimulus
The pattern of frequencies and intensities of the sound stimulus
Aphasia
Difficulties in speaking or understanding speech due to brain damage.
Articulator
Structure involved in speech production, such as the tongue, lips, teeth, jaw, and soft palate.
Audiovisual Speech Perception
A perception of speech that is affected by both auditory and visual stimulation, as when a person sees a tape of someone saying /ga/ with the sound /ba/ substituted and perceives /da/. Also called McGurk effect.
Broca’s Aphasia
Language problems, caused by damage to Broca’s area in the frontal lobe, characterized by laboured and stilted speech and short sentences.
Broca’s Area
An area in the frontal lobe that is important for language perception and production. One effect of damage is difficulty in speaking.
Categorical Perception
Perceiving one sound at short voice onset times and another sound at longer voice onset times. The listener perceives only two categories across the whole range of voice onset times.
Coarticulation
Overlapping articualtion that occurs when different phonemes follow one another in speech. Because of these effects the same phoneme can be articualted differently depending on the context i.e. /b/ in boat and boot.
Dual-stream Model of Speech Perception
Proposes a ventral stream starting in the temporal lobe that is responsible for recognizing speech, and a dorsal stream starting in the parietal lobe that is responsible for linking the acoustical signal to the movements used to produce speech.
Formant
Horizontal band of energy in the speech spectogram associated with vowels.
Formant Transitions
In the speech stimulus, the rapid shift in frequency that precedes a formant.
Indexical Characteristic
Characteristic of the speech stimulus that indicates information about a speaker, such as their age, gender, or emotional state.
McGurk Effect
A perception of speech that is affected by both auditory and visual stimulation, as when a person sees a tape of someone saying /ga/ with the sound /ba/ substituted and perceives /da/. Also called audiovisual speech perception.
Motor Theory of Speech Perception
Proposes a close link between how speech is perceived and how it is produced. The idea behind this theory is that when we hear a particualr speech sound, this activates the motor mechanisms that are responsible for producing that sound, and it is the activation of these motor mechanisms that allow us to perceive the sound.
Multimodal
Involvement of a number of different senses in determining perception. Speech perception can be influenced by audition, vision and touch.
Phoneme
The shortest segment of speech that, if changed, changes the meaning of the word.
Phonemic Restoration Effect
Effect that occurs in speech perception when listeners perceive a phoneme in a word even though the acoustic signal of that phoneme is obscured by another sound, such as white noise or a cough.
Phonetic Boundary
The voice onset time when perception changes from one speech category to another in a categorical perception experiment.
Shadowing
Listeners’ repetition aloud of what they hear as they are hearing it.
Sound Spectogram
A plot showing the pattern of intensities and frequencies of a speech stimulus.
Speech Segmentation
The process of perceiving individual words from the continuous flow of the speech signal.
Statistical Learning
Process of learning about transitional probabilities and other characteristics of the environment. Statistical learning for properties of language has been demonstrated in young infants.
Transitional Probabilities
In language, the chances that one sound will follow another. Part of learning a language involves learning transitional probabilities in that language.
Voice Cells
Neurons in the temporal lobe that respond more strongly to same-species voices than to calls of other animalsor to “non-voice” sounds.
Voice Onset Time (VOT)
In speech production, the time delay between the beginning of a sound and the beginning of vibration of the vocal chords.
Wernicke’s Aphasia
An inability to comprehend words or arrange sounds into coherent speech, caused by damage to Wernicke’s area.
Wernicke’s Area
An area in the temporal lobe involved in speech perception. Damage to this area causes Wernicke’s aphasia, which is characterized by difficuly in understanding speech.
Word Deafness
Occurs in most extreme form of Wernicke’s aphasia, when a person cannot recognize words, even though the ability to hear pure tones remains intact.
