Perception- Acoustic cues to vowels and consonants

Question 1

How does production vary across and within speaker?

Answer 1

physiological, sociophonetic, speaking styles, accent
coarticulation
noise contamination (no absolute phoneme)

Question 2

Bottom up perception uses

Answer 2

acoustic and visual cues

Question 3

Top down perception uses

Answer 3

interpretation of linguistic cues

Question 4

4 aspects contained in the speech signal?

Answer 4

Indexical info, suprasegmental, gross segmental, detailed segmental

Question 5

indexical info is..

Answer 5

lungusitc and extra-ling: identify speaker and give information eg accent, age, gender

Question 6

suprasegmental is..

Answer 6

Specific features that are superimposed on the utterance=
Common supra-segmental features are the stress, tone and duration in the syllable or word for a continuous speech sequence. Sometimes even harmony and nasalization are also included under this category.
- CHANGE MEANING

Question 7

gross segmental is…

Answer 7

Amplitude envolope and duration (syllables or accent patterns)
-NO CHANGE IN MEANING

Question 8

detailed segmental is..

Answer 8

acoustic CUES: perception of specific feature (eg formant f2 transition)

Question 9

What is an acoustic cue?

Answer 9

a detailed segmental feature that when changed alters the acoustic perception - eg F1 and F2 are acoustic cues in vowels but others are not.

Question 10

Describe the continuum technique for testing acoustic cues.

Answer 10

use synthesised speech and control all parameters and change only acoustic patterns

• use a sound continuum and vary the VOT
  1) identification task (LABEL phonemes heard and plot gradient of variance against each word)
  2) Discrimination ( hearing DIFFERENCE between phonemes- plot % correct

Question 11

What are the most important cues for acoustic perception?

Answer 11

phonetic features: place, manner, voicing

Question 12

what is ‘cue multiplicity’?

Answer 12

tend to need all three cues to distinguish phoneme- signalled by more than one cue

Question 13

Other cues?- Borden 2003

Answer 13

Cues of harmonics/aperiodic, intensity, form own duration

Question 14

how do you measure categorical perception?

Answer 14

Goldstone and Hedrickson 2002: stimuli in equal stepsand identify difference doesn’t give equal change-> shown by tones (perceptual warping)

Question 15

people have better __ than ___ category discrimination

Answer 15

across than within as there is a clear switch shown

Question 16

Evidence for auditory sensitivities of mammalian auditory system

Answer 16

Kuhl and Miller 1975: chinchillas: conditioned to discriminate between /ta/ and /da/ and found same results as humans-similar cochlear

Question 17

Evidence for auditory sensitivities: Burn and Ward 1978

Answer 17

Musicians are better at distinguishing melodicity of chords and have better categorical perception than naive listeners

Question 18

why is it better to be sensitive to acoustic cues?

Answer 18

Able to decode speech in more contexts if have better perceptual sensitivities