Chapter 9 - Speech perception and reading Flashcards
Categorial perception
A sound intermediate between two phonemes is perceived as being one or other of the phonemes; a similar phenomenon is found in vision with colour perception.
Syllable
A unit of speech consisting of one vowel sound with or without one or more additional consonants (Water has two syllables; wa and ter).
Allophones
Variant forms of a given phoneme; for example, the phoneme “p” is associated with various allophones (e.g., in Pit and Spit).
Segmentation
Dividing the almost continuous sounds of speech into separate phonemes and words.
Coarticulation
A speaker’s production of phoneme is influenced by their production of the previous sound and by preparations for the next sound.
McGurk effect
A mismatch between spoken and visual (lip-based) information leads listeners to perceive a sound or word involving a blending of the auditory and visual information.
Phonemic restoration effect
The finding that listeners are unaware that a phoneme has been deleted and replaced by a non-speech sound (e.g., cough) within a sentence.
Ganong effect
The finding that perception of an ambiguous phoneme is biased towards a sound that produces a word rather than a non-word.
Lexical Access
Accessing detailed information about a given word by entering the lexicon
Uniqueness point
The point in time in spoken word recognition at which the available perceptual information is consistent with only one word.
Pure word deafness
A condition involving severely impaired speech perception but intact speech production, reading, writing and perception of non-speech sounds.
Word meaning deafness
A condition in which there is selective impairment of the ability to understand spoken (but not written) language.
Transcortical sensory aphasia
A condition in which spoken words can be repeated but comprehension of spoken and written language is severely impaired.
Deep dysphasia
A condition involving semantic errors when trying to repeat spoken words and a generally poor ability to repeat spoken words and non-words.
Lexical decision task
Participants presented with a string of letters or auditory stimulus decide rapidly whether it forms a word.
Naming task
A task in which visually presented words are pronounced aloud rapidly.
Orthography
The study of letters and word spelling.
Phonology
The study of sounds of words and parts of words.
Semantics
The study of the meaning conveyed by words, phrases and sentences.
Homophones
Words pronounced in the same way, but that differ in their spelling (pain/pane; rock/rug)
Phonological neighbourhood
Words are phonological neighbours if they differ in only one phoneme (wipe, pipe and tap are phonological neighbours of type)
Word superiority effect
A target letter is more readily detected in a letter string when the string forms a word than when it does not.
Orthographic neighbours
With reference to a target word, the number of words that can be formed by changing one of its letters.
Semantic priming
The fidning that word recognition is facilitated by the prior presentation of a semantically related word.
Pseudowords
Non-words consisting of strings of letters that can be pronounced (mantiness, fass)
Cascade processing
Later processing stages start before earlier processing stages have been completed when performing a task.
Grapheme
A small unit of written language corresponding to a phoneme (e.g., the ph in photo)
Phonemes
The smallest units of sound that distinguish one word from another and contribute to word meaning; the number and nature of phonemes varies across languages.
Surface dyslexia
A condition in which regular words and non-words can be read but there is impaired ability to read irregular or exception words.
Phonological dyslexia
A condition in which familiar words can be read but there is impaired ability to read unfamiliar words and non-words.
Deep dyslexia
A condition in which reading unfamiliar words and non-words is impaired and there are semantic errors (e.g., reading missile as rocket).
Saccades
Rapid eye movements separated by eye fixations lasting about 250 ms.
Perceptual span
The effective field of view in reading (letters to the left and right of fixation that can be perceived).
Parafovea
The area in the retina immediately surrounding the fovea.
Spillover effect
Any given word is fixated longer during reading when preceded by a rare word rather than a common one.
Lexical parafoveal-on-foveal effect
The finding that fixation duration on the current word (word n) is influenced by lexical properties of the next word (word n+1).
