Chapter 3

Question 1

Frequency

Answer 1

Number of wavelengths that pass a given point in a given amount of time
(Pitch)

Question 2

Amplitude

Answer 2

Amount of change a wave undergoes in one cycle

Question 3

Fundamental frequency

Answer 3

Lowest frequency produced by vibrating object

Question 4

Overtones

Answer 4

Higher frequencies produced by vibrating object

Question 5

Timbre

Answer 5

The psychological perception of sound wave complexity

Question 6

Periodic sound (Vowels)

Answer 6

• Regularly repeating pattern
• Produced by vibrating object
• Perceived as ringing or musical

Question 7

Aperiodic sound (Consonants)

Answer 7

• No regularly repeating pattern
• Produced by collisions or friction
• Perceived as noise

Question 8

Cochlea (“concha”)

Answer 8

Organ of auditory sensation (inner ear)

Question 9

Basilar membrane

Answer 9

Extends inside cochlea, undulated in vibrating fluid of cochlea

Question 10

Hair cells

Answer 10

Specialized cells of basilar membrane, sensitive to difference frequencies

Question 11

Tonotopic organization

Answer 11

Progressive arrangement of cells sensitive to different frequencies

Question 12

Primary auditory cortex (A1)

Answer 12

Superior temporal lobe, initial processing of input from cochlea

Question 13

Coarticulation

Answer 13

• Overlapping phonemes in the speech stream

- Preceding or following consonant modifies vowel formants

Question 14

Plosives

Answer 14

b & p, d & t, g & k

Question 15

Aspiration

Answer 15

Puff of air accompanying the release of some plosives

Question 16

Voice onset time (VOT)

Answer 16

Difference between release of plosive (consonant) and beginning of vocal fold vibration (vowel)

Question 17

Categorical perception

Answer 17

Continuously changing stimuli perceived as belonging to discrete sets

Question 18

Phonemic restorarion

Answer 18

Filling in missing segments of speech stream with contextually appropriate material

Question 19

Multimodal perception

Answer 19

Senses strongly interact to produce rich experience of world

Question 20

McGurk effect

Answer 20

Speech perception combines both auditory and visual information

Question 21

High-amplitude sucking technique

Answer 21

• Measures frequency of sucking on non-nutritive nipple

- Changes in frequency indicate discrimination of stimuli

Question 22

Newborns prefer

Answer 22

• Mother’s voice
• Mother’s language (spoken by another woman)
• Familiar nursery rhyme (heard in the womb)

Question 23

Infant-directed speech (Motherese/caregiver speech)

Answer 23

Way of speaking to infants, attracting their attention, helping them learn language

Question 24

Prefer infant-directed speech because

Answer 24

of its acoustic qualities and its features are clearer and more exaggerated

Question 25

Prosodic bootstrapping

Answer 25

Infants use intonation and stress patterns to infer phrase and word boundaries

Question 26

Most multisyllabic words in English begin on a

Answer 26

stressed syllable

Question 27

Metrical segmentation strategy

Answer 27

rule of thumb assuming English words begin on a stressed syllable

Question 28

Transitional probability

Answer 28

The likelihood that a particular event will occur next given the current event

Question 29

Perceptual narrowing

Answer 29

Process of transitioning from more universal or unconstrained perceptual abilities to those that are more narrow or constrained

Question 30

Distributional learning

Answer 30

Tracking of the frequency and location of various sounds in the speech stream

Question 31

Lack of invariance

Answer 31

No reliable relationship between phoneme and acoustic signal

Question 32

Motor theory

Answer 32

People perceive speech by inferring articulatory gestures, not analyzing the speech stream

Question 33

Nativism

Answer 33

View that behavior is mainly shaped by natural selection, encoded in genes

Question 34

Language acquisition device (Chomsky, 1959)

Answer 34

- Specialized processing units in the brain | - Guide rapid development of language in infants

Question 35

Module (Fodor, 1983)

Answer 35

Dedicated neural system evolved to perform a specific function

Question 36

Speech is special (Liberman, 1982, 1996)

Answer 36

View of speech perception as distinct from general auditory perception

Question 37

Reasons for this idea:

Answer 37

- Speech perception and production are uniquely human abilities - Processed via the motor system - Objects of speech perception were the intended vocal tract gestures

Question 38

General auditory framework

Answer 38

Speech perception operates by same mechanisms that have evolved for perceiving environmental sounds

Question 39

Fuzzy-logical model of perception

Answer 39

Perceptual decisions made by matching relative goodness of sensory inputs to prototypes in memory

Question 40

Direct realism

Answer 40

- Newer form of motor theory - Sensory input sufficiently rich, allows us to completely recover object of perception - Rejects "speech is special"

Question 41

Mirror neurons

Answer 41

- Neurons in primates that fire when perceiving or performing task - Links perceptual and motor systems