lecture 2- complexity of speech perception

Question 1

state- once we remove spaces between words it becomes much more difficult to break down the speech stream into its component parts

Question 2

advantages of coarticulation?

Answer 2

• allows speech to be faster, more fluent
• gives listener clues as to upcoming phonemes

Question 3

what are disadvantages of coarticulation

Answer 3

• no definitive acoustical pattern for any phoneme
• speech perception system has to see past these differences to recognise phonemes

Question 4

there is more coarticulation…. words that …. words

Answer 4

within, between

Question 5

what is word frequency?

Answer 5

when some words are more common thab others
- 50 most commonly used words account for more than half the speech we hear (miller, 1951)

Question 6

syllable stress

Answer 6

content words (or open class words)
- one of huge nummber of words that convey meaning in a sentence ie nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs

function words (or closed class words)
- one of a limited number of words that do the grammatical work of language eg determines and prepositions - the,a,to,in and because

Question 7

in english context and function words are stressed differently..

Answer 7

• content words tend to start with a stressed syllable
• function words tend to be unstressed

Question 8

syllable stress- strong syllable

Answer 8

if you hear a strong syllable it is likely to be at the start of a content word

Question 9

syllable stress- weak syllable

Answer 9

if you hear a weak syllable it is likely to be either towards the end of a content word, or at the start of a function word

Question 10

state- the speech perception system makes use of this, it is called the metrical segmentation strategy

Question 11

state- we are talking specifically about english, other languages differ in whether or not syllables are stressed/ unstressed

Question 12

syllable stress- evidence

Answer 12

culter & butterfield (1992)- looked to see whether we use syllable stress to segment speech

presented items like: conduct ascents uphill
- no meaningful context to aid segmantation
- the stress pattern violates our expectations

they found that these items reliably induced mishearing’s in their participants

Question 13

if phonemes sound slightly different in different context, how can the speech perception reliably recognise them?

Answer 13

categorical perception

Question 14

state- humans are better at hearing the differences between categories of sound than variations within a category, in other words
- we are sensitive to the difference between eg b and p
- we are insensitive to the difference between variations eg b

Question 15

categorical perception- evidence

Answer 15

development work from infants ( eg werker and tees, 1994)

english and hindi
- at 6 months old, infants with english speaking parents could make photonic distinctions present in hindi but not in english
- ability to do this rapidly declined over the next 2 months

kikuyu
- at 2 months, infants with kikuyu speaking parents could distinguish p and b phonemes (kikuyu does not make this distinction)
- ability to do this lost by around 1 year

Question 16

factors influencing categorical perception

Answer 16

• individual differences
• speech rate ( summerfield, 1981)
• context- “lexical identification shift”

Question 17

individual differences

Answer 17

different people will categorise voice-onset time slightly differently

Question 18

speech rate (summerfield, 1981)

Answer 18

• perceptual system adjusts to fast rates of speech
• a sound with a short VOT that should be perceived as ‘b’ will instead be perceived as ‘p’ when someone talks quickly

Question 19

context- “lexical identification shift”

Answer 19

• if we hear a phoneme that is ambigous between ‘b’ and ‘p’ we tend to report the phoneme that creates a word