Lecture 7 - Languge Comprehension Flashcards
What is language?
Language is a form of communication.
How is the boundary of language?
When language is defined based on the function of communication, it is hard to identify the boundary of language.
How can we differentiate human’s and animal’s language?
Complexity (in forms and rules) is the main factor that differentiates human’s and animal’s language.
How many different languages are there in the world?
7000+ languages (according to Google)
How can we calculate the number of languages in the world?
We need to define language like what is a language or dialect and how different the two languages should be to be considered as two different languages.
How is the boundary to define languages?
The boundary to define two langues is very blurry, so it’s difficult to define the differences between two languages.
How is the definition of language and dialect?
The definition of language and dialect is very fluid that there is no clear cut boundary between two languages
What is phonetics?
- It is to study how speech sounds are produced (articulation system to produce the speech sound), transmitted (acoustic properties: how the sound looks like in terms of vibration in air) and perceived (auditory system: perceived by cochlea and receptors)
- It is about the properties of sound (produced, transmitted and perceived)
What is a phoneme?
It is the basic unit of sound in human language (e.g. dog -> “d”, “o”, “g”)
What is a phonology?
- It is about how elementary part speech sounds compose langauge
- to study how to understand the language part of sound
What is prosody?
It is the non-phonetic speech elements that also carry information
Examples of prosody
Stress, tone -> carry meaning of context and emotion
What is morphology?
It studies morpheme (the basic unit of language) that carries meaning, about how it is *spelt and does not differentiate vowel or auditory information
What studies how language are visually constructed (visual form)?
Orthography
What studies the grammatical structure of sentences and the rules to combine basic elements of language to form larger chunks of information?
Syntax
What is semantics?
Semantics is the study of meaning of langauge
What is lexicon?
It is the collection of words and vocabulary
What is lexeme?
It is a basic unit of meaning independent of word inflection
What is pragmatics?
Pragmatics studies how context contribute to the meaning.
Examples of pragmatics
Sarcasm and exaggeration
What is the difference between speech processing and text reading in terms of the mode of processing?
Speech processing is auditory processing and text reading is visual processing
What is the difference between speech processing and text reading in terms of the speed?
Text reading is faster than speech processing as the process of reading is not sophisticated and common
What is the speed for text reading?
People can read 250 - 350 words per minute for text reading.
What determines the speed for speech processing?
The speed for speech processing is determined by the speaking rate, while the normal speech rate is 120 - 200 words per minute.
Can you obtain the speed for speech processing?
No, the speed for speech processing cannot be obtained as the speed of speec his not determined by the listeners.
How much higher can the comprehension of speech processing be successful of the speech rate?
Comprehension can be successful at two times or more of the normal speech rate.
How is the capacity of speech processing, text reading and speech production?
Our capacity of speech processing is similar to the capacity of text reading, while it is higher than the capacity of speech production.
What can’t people produce speech at a higher rate?
People cannot produce speech at a higher rate as it is very cognitive demanding and that the entire articulatory system has an intrinsic scale.
What is the emergence order of text reading and language processing?
The ability of text reading is developed later than language processing.
is the emergence of writing earlier or later than speech?
The emergence of writing is presumably later than speech by comparison it tone scale of human evolution.
Can the content in text and speech be revisited?
Content in text can be revisited for better comprehension while content in speech cannot be revisited.
Is there space in text and speech?
Different from text having space between space, there is no space between in words in speech.
Why is adding a space in text c_____-e______________?
Adding a space in text is cost-efficient as it is useful for differentiating to define words.
Speech contains rich n___-l____________ information?
Speech contains rich non-literal information
What are the four stages in speech processing?
We can define speech processing into decoding, segment, recognition, integration.
What does the speech processing start with?
It starts with auditory input to hear things from ears.
What do you need to do after you hear things in speech processing?
You have to select speech sounds from all raw signals (Differentiate speech sounds from ambient sounds).
What do you need to do after receiving the signal of speech sounds in speech processing?
The brain should transform acoustic signals to extract abstract information to save things, and further have an abstract representation of things,
What is being done in word recognition in speech processing?
Activate lexical candidates, competition and retrieval of lexical information.
What is utterance interpretation in speech processing?
It is a continuous form of speech that has to be evolved from syntactic analysis and thematic processing.
What is the last stage of speech processing?
Integration into discourse model
What are the three contextual effects commonly exist in speech processing?
- McGurk effect
- Phonemic restoration effect
- Ganong effect
What is speech dependent on?
Speech is dependent on contextual information.
What processing is speech processing about?
Speech processing is about top-down processing (using personal experience to infer things you are processing).
What is McGurk effect?
McGurk effect is about multimodal sensory integration
Perception of visual patterns can affect perception of what pattern in McGurk effect?
Perception of visual pattern affects perception of auditory pattern.
What is phonemic restoration effect?
It uses some noise to mark the consonant.
What is Ganong effect?
It is the tendency to perceive an ambiguous speech sound as a phoneme that would complete a real word.
What is the possible risk of Ganong effect?
The possibility to process a phoneme can distort a word in speech.
What are the three theories of speech perception?
- Motor Theory
- Trace Model
- Cohort Model
What process is speech recognition as suggested in Motor Theory?
Speech recognition is fundamentally a process of recognising or matching the motor programmes that the speaker used to generate the speech sounds, as suggested in Motor Theory.