phoneme perception - exam 2

Question 1

categorical perception

Answer 1

phenomenon where sounds are perceived as belonging to distinct categories

within a category - difficulty hearing differences

boundary between categories - small differences are noticeable (peak discrimination at boundary)

Question 2

perceptual magnet effect

Answer 2

describes how sounds that are close to a prototype (typical /i/ sound) within a vowel category are perceived as more similar than they actually are

reduces discriminability of sounds within a category, especially near the prototype

good /i/ has a stronger pull
less good /i/ has a weaker pull

harder to tell apart stimuli near the prototype - all perceived as /i/ & are therefore less different from each other

Question 3

confusion matrix

Answer 3

a chart that shows which sounds are most often confused w/ each other based on listener judgments

Question 4

distance map

Answer 4

a visual representation of perceptual distances between sounds

often derived from confusion matrices

sounds closer together in the map are more likely to be confused

Question 5

McGurk effect

Answer 5

phenomenon where visual info from lip movements influences how we hear speech sounds

video: shows mouth saying “ga”
audio: “ba”
interpretation: “da”

brain blends audio & visual to come up w/ something in the middle

shows that our brains integrate both visual & auditory cues to understand speech

Question 6

identification

Answer 6

determining which category a sound belongs to

whether a sound is /b/ or /p/

Question 7

discrimination

Answer 7

detecting differences between 2 sounds w/out necessarily categorizing them

Question 8

identification curves

Answer 8

steep around category boundaries

ambiguous region

y-axis = %p
x-axis = VOT

Question 9

discrimination curves

Answer 9

peak discrimination at boundary

wiggle room to get a sound slightly wrong & still be understood

want all of your resources at the boundary

y-axis = % correct
x-axis = VOT

Question 10

is categorical perception innate or learned

Answer 10

partly a property of the auditory system - newborns can perceive sound categories in all languages

experience w/ specific language categories shapes how finely we can discriminate sounds, tunes our perception to language-specific contrasts

Question 11

where in vowel space will pairs of sounds be most & least discriminable

Answer 11

most - near vowel category boundaries

least - near vowel prototypes - due to perceptual magnet effect