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.
