Cognition: Language comprehension Flashcards
What is meant by speech perception?
The process by which we convert a stream of speech to individual words and sentences.
What is meant by prosody?
The rhythm, intonation (rise and fall) and stress patterns of speech
Does recognition of a word usually come during or after a word is uttered?
During
Name and explain the two major problems associated with speech production
The invariance problem reflects the variation in the production of speech sounds across speech contexts. The segmentation problem refers to the detection of distinct words in what is a continuous string of speech sounds.
What is meant by co-articulation?
The tendency for a speech sound to be influenced by sounds preceding or following it
What did Cutler and Norris’s metric segmentation strategy propose?
In english we use the rhythmical patterns in the language in order to segment speech
Does a strong word syllable always mark a boundary in english? How does this differ in other countries
No, sometimes these syllables fall elsewhere in the word, sometimes not at all. In some languages stress is always in a given position such as finnish where it lands on the first syllable.
Describe the head turn procedure
Infant sits on parents lap with headphones in to not give any signals, lights in front and either side of infant with loudspeaker next to each, The light in front begins to blink on and off, when the child focuses on it the light stops blinking and the one next to it starts. A voice is played through the loudspeaker until the infant shifts its attention. The light in front starts blinking again and the next trial begins.
How was the head turn procedure used to test word comprehension in infants?
7 & 1/2 month infants were familiarised with word patterns such as cup and dog for 30 seconds, sentences with these words were played on the loudspeakers, babies attention spent longer at these than other sentences suggesting they could segregate the individual words.
What do infants rely heavily on to segment the speech?
stress patterns
Name and describe another method of segmenting speech
Recognising the phonotactic constraints which describe the specific sound groupings that occur in a language
What is the onset of a word and what follows this?
The original phoneme, it is followed by the rime
What is meant by a slip of the ear
When we misperceive a word or phrase in speech
Name three word slips in identifying the word boundary according to Bond and Garnes
Boundary shifts; an ice bucket - nice bucket
Word boundary deletions; ten year party- tenure party
Word boundary additions; descriptive linguistics- the script of linguistics
How did Cutler and Butterfield’s findings differ to Bond and Garne’s in identifying word slips regarding word boundaries?
They found four categories; deletion of a boundary before a weak or strong syllable and addition of a boundary before a weak or strong syllable. They predicted and confirmed more insertion errors before strong syllables and more deletion errors before weaker syllables.
What ERP component was used on the study on the effect of disfluency on speech comprehension
N400; associated with the processing of meaning in a language.
What was the hypothesis in the study on the effect of disfluency on speech comprehension
That, since a pause is more likely to come before less predictable words, participants would be able to take this as a cue a less predictable word was coming.
What did the results of the study on the effect of disfluency on speech comprehension show?
I a memory test later asking if the words were presented earlier, The typical N400 effect when unpredictable words were presented relative to predictable but this was reduced in the disfluent sentences suggesting disfluency aids comprehension.
What is meant by categorical perception?
The perception of stimuli on a sensory continuum as falling into distinct categories.
Categorical perception means we are more sensitive to differences in sounds ______ phonetic categories than ______.
Across;within
How are vowel sounds created and what information do they carry
Created by unobstructed air through the larynx, carry information about stress, rhythm and prosody.
What is meant by voicing?
Speech sounds are produced while vocal cords are vibrating
How did researchers test categorical perception in infants? When was it found to be present?
Checking if the rate at which they wsucked there thumb changed indicating inerest when a sound changed from pa to ba. They found it was present at 4 months however this disappears as they acquire experience with their native language.
What is the right ear advantage for speech, what are the exemptions from this?
Language sounds are processed more efficiently when presented to the right ear than to the left, this is only the case for consonants
What is meant by the phoneme restoration effect?
The tendency to hear a complete word even when a phoneme has been removed from the input.
Name and describe another top down influence of speech perception
The McGurk effect is a perceptual illusion that illustrates the interplay of visual and auditory processing in speech perception.
What two categories do models of speech perception fall into?
Modular; Series of independently functioning modules that process information without being influenced by context , and that interactive processing underlies speech perception; multiple sources of influence affect speech processing.
Name and briefly explain a modular model of speech production
Cohort model;we predict the word being uttered as possibilities for the words become narrower the further along a word is uttered. eg: cr… could be crack criminal or cranium but croco… is most likely crocodile. Those that no longer fit the pattern lower in activation.
What is the name given to the part of a word that only can give that word in the cohort model
uniqueness point
What did the original cohort model suggest in terms of top down and bottom up processing? How does this differ from the revised model?
Bottom up processing of the acoustic signal and the top down influence of the system context would work simultaneously however the revised model has moved up the role of context to a later point in processing; the integration stage when sentence meaning is decided.
How is a words uniqueness point determined?
Gating paradigm; first 40ms of the word is shown, the 80ms etc and for each the participant has to guess the word and their confidence rating.
What is meant by the lexical decision task?
Participants with a letter string and must decide if it’s a word or not, ERP’s show the word is recognised faster with words with sooner uniqueness points
What are the drawbacks of the cohort system?
Does not address how the start of a word in identified in a continuous stream of speech. Does not address the effect of cohort size on the speed of cohort recognition, some studies have also shown a word is identified after subsequent words have been presented which is not consistent with the cohort model.
What does the TRACE model of speech comprehension claim to approve upon the cohort model?
Considering top down processing and processing of sub optimal (noisy) input.
In the TRACE model, what happens when conditions degrade (noisy background)?
The semantic and syntactic influence grow in effect.
What is meant by a localist representation?
Where a singular unit represents a particular concept
List the three successes of the TRACE model
Successfully identifying successive phonemes from overlapping speech input; Accounting for how word level information is used to supplement speech information in identifying phonemes; accounting for phontactic effects without explicit phonotactic rules being represented while also accounting for irregulars
What is the arguable downside to the TRACE model
It may overestimate the role of top down processes
According to Levy what 4 things must any realistic theory of sentence comprehension account for?
- Processing of input that is not perfectly formed
- How we resolve ambiguity
- How we make inferences on the basis of incomplete input
- How we overcome points of difficulty within a sentence
What are the two main types of models for lexical access?
Serial search models/autonomous search models and direct access models
What does an serial search model propose
A series of stages to word recognition, with orthographical access,phonological access, and semantic/syntactic access occurring at three separate stages, only one of which is accessed at a time. Entries in the lexicon are arranged by frequency and are retrieved via a search process.
What do direct access models propose?
parallel word access; each word or morpheme within the lexicon is represented logogon (a unit that specifies the word’s phonological, semantic, orthographic features) and retrieval occurs through activation rather than a search process.
Name and describe two tasks other than lexical decision tasks which investigate lexical access
Word naming tasks require participants to name a word, while response time is measured. Sentence verification tasks present a sentence frame within a target word, and the participant must decide if the word fits in the frame.
What are open class and closed class words and how does frequency effects affect them?
Open class words are content words such as nouns verbs and adjectives and are affected by frequency effects while closed class words are not.
What method do researchers use to attempt to capture performance during lexical access?
Eye tracking
What is meant by repetition priming?
Repeated exposure to a word lead to fast responses in the lexical decision task
What finding is described by the frequency attenuation effect?
The effect of repetition on the lexical decision task is stronger on low frequency than high frequency words.
From now on there will only be terms
ok
What are homographs?
Words with the same spelling but different meaning and pronunciation.
