Cognitive Psychology - Speech and Language Flashcards
Define language
A system of visual/vocal symbols that have meaning to user and recipient
Define linguistics
The study of the rules of language
Define psycholinguistics
The study of the role of cognition in language acquisition, production and comprehension, including how verbal behaviour develops
Which model looks at turning ideas into air and back again?
Communication model
What produces speech?
A set of muscles in the face, mouth and throat
What’s a phoneme?
The smallest unit of speech sound (not letters) e.g., pin (p+i+n) and ship (sh+i+p)
What’s a group of phonemes?
The smallest unit of speech that influences meaning e.g., bet > bit, dig > gig
What are the 3 parts to making consonants?
Voice, place, manner
What is voice? (making consonants)
Whether/when vocal cords vibrate
What is place? (making consonants)
Where in the vocal tract the constriction takes place
What is manner? (making consonants)
How the air moves out of the vocal tract/what sort of constriction takes place
Give examples of voice
Zip/Sip, Bat/Pat, Dip/Tip
Give examples of place
Pat/Tat/Cat, Bot/Dot/Got
Give examples of manner
Nose/Doze (nasal/stop), Dip/Zip (stop/fricative)
What is Voice Onset Time (VOT)
When lips open relative to when vocal chords start vibrating
Do ‘Pa’ and ;Ba’ differ in Voice Onset Time (VOT)?
Yes
How do ‘Pa’ and ‘Ba’ differ in VOT?
‘Pa’ VOT tends to be about 50 ms slower than ‘Ba’
What is the hypothesised and actual perception of phonemes ‘ba’ and ‘pa’
-Hypothetically, we would expect a gradual shift from ‘ba’ to ‘pa’. Actual perception is categorical.
-Hypothetically, adults should be able to discriminate between each VOT. There is actually an abrupt shift typically at about 20-25 ms.
What are the 2 consequences of categorical perception?
1) We are good at perceiving changes across category boundaries
2) We are bad at perceiving changes within category boundaries
What are the 3 parts to making vowels?
1) Height
2) Backness
3) Roundedness
What is height? (making vowels)
The vertical position of tongue in the mouth
What is backness? (making vowels) Give 2 examples
How far back in the mouth the tongue is.
1) “ee” = front
2) “oo” = back
What is roundedness? (making vowels)
The shape of the lips. Correlated with tongue position in many languages.
What are formants?
Peaks of the acoustic signal/distinctive frequency components we need to distinguish vowels
What formants are needed to identify a vowel?
The first 2 formants (F1 and F2) are often sufficient to identify a vowel
Give 2 key points about The McGurk Effect
1) McGurk effect is an example of how 1 sensory modality can influence another (hearing)
2) Speech production is a multi-modal process; not only based on auditory but also visual cues
Give 3 points for why context is important for word recognition
1) Computer generated novel sounds that fell between /g/ and /k/ (Ganong, 1980) - folowed by ift -> gift, iss -> kiss
2) Speech is full of hesitations, sloppy word productions etc.
3) 47% recognition of isolated words vs 100% recognition within context of original conversation (Pollack & Pickett, 1964)
In Pollack and Pickett’s (1964) study, what was the recognition percent for isolated words
47%
In Pollack and Pickett’s (1964) study, what was the recognition percent for words within context of original conversation
100%
What movement does the production of speech involve?
Fine control of the vocal tract to shape the sound wave to convey particular meaning
What does perceiving speech involve?
‘Reconstructing’ the meaning from the sound wave
Give 4 sources of information that help us to ‘reconstruct’ the meaning from a sound wave to perceive speech?
1) Key clues in the wave
2) Knowledge of language
3) Contextual cues
4) Multimodal sources of information including visual cues
Simply put, what does the Communication model that turns ideas into air and back again involve?
Cognition - Speech Production, Air movement, Cognition - Speech Perception
How many key procedures to investigate speech perception in infants are there?
3
Outline the 3 procedures/methods to investigate speech perception in infants
1) High amplitude sucking
2) Head turn preference
3) Preferential looking
How does high amplitude sucking investigate speech production in infants?
Rate of sucking increases when new sound is detected, then slows down again if sound is repeated
How does head turn preference investigate speech perception in infants?
If infants turn their head or longer (or shorter) to 1 type of stimulus compared to another, then they must be able to perceptually distinguish them (requires being able to hold head up)
How does preferential looking investigate speech production in infants?
If infants look for longer (or shorter) to 1 type of stimulus compared to another whilst hearing the names of the stimulus (e.g. Dad), then they must recognise the name
Which of the 3 methods would you use to conduct the following experiment?: You are interested in how long 12 month olds pay attention to novel and familiar words
Head turn
Which of the 3 methods would you use to conduct the following experiment?: You are interested in whether 2 month olds can tell the difference between changing speech sounds
High amplitude sucking
Which of the 3 methods would you use to conduct the following?: You are interested in whether 6 month olds understand the meaning of different words
Preferential looking
Which method did Eimas et al. use in their 1971 language learning study?
High amplitude sucking
What does research by Eimas et al. (1971) tell us about language learning?
Infants as young as 1 month old could tell the difference between consonants ‘ba’ and ‘pa’
What is a criticism of Eimas et al’s (1971) study?
- Phonemes vary between different languages. E.g. ‘‘ba’ and ‘pa’ are common to English but are less common in other languages
- Therefore, this ability to distinguish between phonemes language specific
According to categorical perception, are phonemic categories language specific?
Yes
What are English versus Hindi phonemic categories?
- /d/ (alveolar) vs /d/ (retroflex)
- /t/ (alveolar) vs /t/ (retroflex)
When are infants sensitive to all categorical boundaries?
In the first 6 months
When do infants become sensitive only to their native categories?
By 12 months
What would happen if infants had to rely on being taught individual words?
Their vocabulary would be a fraction of what it actually is
Simply put, how does language emerge?
Out of ‘basic’ processes of movement and [perception
Who conducted researched into the emergence of language, looking at whether production patterns influence the processing of prelinguistic children?
DePaolis, R., et al. (2011)
What is the first step towards language emergence within infants?
Babbling
What are 4 key things about babbling in terms of the emergence of language?
1) It is non-linguistic (not really ‘speaking’)
2) The emergence of stable, adult-like syllables occurs around 6-8 months
3) There are both universal features and individual differences
4) It is shaped to some degree by ambient language
What link did DePaolis, R., et al. (2011) find?
Accuracy of spoken words are related to the number of words in child’s ‘lexicon’
What does the production-perception loop involve, and what link does it show?
When infants hear (recognises) sounds in adult speech corresponding to their own babbling, they already ‘know’ how to produce those sounds, so their first words are pretty accurate (e.g. “papa”, “mama”) -> shows link between
How many language development milestones are there?
5
Give the ages of the 5 language development milestones
1) 0-5 months
2) 6-12 months
3) 12-18 months
4) 18-48 months
5) > 48 months
What is the 1st language development milestone?
0-5 months: Smiles, coos (aah, ooh, grr), makes different sounds to interact
What is the 2nd language development milestone?
6-12 months: Recognition of simple words, babbling, production of first words
What is the 3rd language development milestone?
12-18 months: Understanding 140-190 words, production of 75-122 words
What is the 4th language developmental milestone?18
18-48 months: Vocabulary spurt, basic grammar, increasingly complex sentences, understanding of more abstract concepts
What is the 5th language developmental ilestone?
> 48 months: Figurative language, combination of sentences, rhymes, takes listener’s perspective
What perceptual consequences does movement have?
changes in movement, changes in air, changes in meaning
How is the auditory system involved in perception?
The auditory system extracts patterns from sound
