Intro to Cognitive Science - Unit 4 Flashcards
What happens when visual and auditory cues are incongruent?
Listeners typically report a third, different input: consider the McGurk effect (R322)
Why is there a crossmodal binding problem when processing modality-specific signals?
Because the neural pathways involved are usually anatomically distinct (R322)
What tentative explanation is there for crossmodal binding?
Synchronized firing: when the input to two modalities is synchronized, they are bound together into the same perception (R323)
What is one of the problems with using fMRI to study multisensory synthesis?
Often, multisensory regions not only contain multisensory neurons, but patches of various unimodally responsive neurons: can’t differentiate between multiples “ones” or single “manys” (R323)
What does it mean for neurons to exhibit “multisensory facilitation” when presented with two or more stimuli of different modality?
The total response evoked can be greater than the sum of the responses evoked by the different stimuli presented in isolation (R323)
What is it about speech perception that suggests a dedicated separate module?
The ability of speech perception to be fast and automatic, and to cope with varying circumstances (53)
What is coarticulation?
When the different phonemes have overlap in their articulation: example; if you’re articulating /b/ in beg you’re already starting to form /ae/
True of false: phonemes have invariant distinctive features
False: consider “top” and “stop”
What two features of speech imply that listeners process acoustic signals in context?
Coarticulation and lack of invariance
What is categorical perception?
The categorization of speech input at the phonemic level: VOT in 0.15 second increments can be categorized as the same phoneme up until a sharply defined boundary, for example (Lisker and Abramson 1970) (58)
What is language, at heart?
The use of symbols to convey meaning (211)
How do researchers believe that language evolved earlier than did speech?
Homo habilis skulls may feature a Broca’s speech area, but the unusual human vocal tract only emerged in Homo sapiens sapiens (212)
What is a morpheme?
A minimal unit of speech used repeatedly in a language to code a specific meaning: kill, -ed, pre-, post-
Approximately how many phonemes are used in the English language?
Around 40 different phonemes (214)
What is syntax?
The rules that specify how words and other morphemes are arranged to yield grammatically acceptable sentences
What is pragmatics?
The manner in which speakers communicate their intentions depending on the social context
What is a speech act?
A sentence uttered to express a speaker’s intention in a way that the listener will recognize (Grice 1975) (217)
What is Broca’s aphasia?
Inability to speak fluently without effort and with correct grammar
Wernicke’s aphasia?
Comprehension dysfunction: effortless and fluent speech, often semantically meaningless
What negative component voltage is seen after semantically unpredictable words?
N400
What does it mean for a paragraph to be referentially coherent?
That the words and phrases of one sentence refer unambiguously to those of the other sentences
What is the immediacy assumption?
Holds that the reader assigns an interpretation to each word as it is fixated; reader may need to review the interpretation based on a subsequent fixation
What is the eye-mind assumption?
Holds that the duration of fixation varies with the amount of information that must be processed in working memory at that instant: the work of comprehension takes place during the fixation; next saccadic eye movement is suppressed until the reader is ready
