Speech

Question 1

Vowels are __________ airflow

Answer 1

unobstructed

Question 2

Consonants are ________ airflow

Answer 2

obstructed

Question 3

Three dimensions of consonants:

Answer 3

Place - bilabial, labio-dental, dental, alveolar, palatal, velar, glottal
Manner - stops, fricatives, affricatives, nasals, liquids, glides
Voicing

Question 4

Spectrograms are:

Answer 4

“Visual speech”

Question 5

Three components of a spectrogram:

Answer 5

1. Frequency of the acoustic signal - speech sounds consist of several frequencies (y-axis)
2. Time - all speech signals have a temporal aspect (x-axis)
3. Intensity - darkness or color (3D aspect)

Question 6

Interesting properties of the speech signal

Answer 6

Parallel transmission

Segmentation problem

Question 7

What is parallel transmission?

Answer 7

Phonemes are encoded at the same time, no breaks between phonemes

Question 8

What is the segmentation problem?

Answer 8

It’s acoustically hard to tell where words begin and end; but, we have no problem perceiving words (we can hear words in our language even if people talk fast)

Question 9

What is the lack of invariance problem?

Answer 9

There is no one-to-one correspondence between the acoustic cues and the phonemes perceived

Question 10

What is the psychological definition of a phoneme?

Answer 10

A category of sounds that we perceive to be the same sound

Question 11

What are sources of variability in speech?

Answer 11

Coarticulation - related to parallel transmission; overlapping articulation of phonemes, how we say a sound is affected by what comes before and after it
Variability between speakers - gender, pitch, accent, speed, age
Variability within speakers - people are sloppy speakers

Question 12

What is the original McGurk effect?

Answer 12

You see a speaker articulating /ga/, hear /ba/ over headphones, but perceive the speaker saying /da/

Question 13

The McGurk effect provides strong evidence for __________

Answer 13

the motor theory of speech perception

Question 14

Perception is a compromise between:

Answer 14

what is heard and what is seen

Question 15

Motor theory of speech perception

Answer 15

We use our knowledge of production to understand speech

Addresses the lack of invariance problem - perception is based on articulatory information and not just the signal

Question 16

Cohort model

Answer 16

Three stages:

1. select a set of candidates - based on phonetic information (bottom-up)
2. narrow set based on more information and other variables (recognition point - the point at which a word is unique - can be auditory or visual)
3. the item is fit into the context

Question 17

TRACE model

Answer 17

Connectionist model
Words are represented across different levels (words, phonemes, features)
all these levels interact with each other

Question 18

Top-down effects

Answer 18

Context effects
Illusions
Phonemic restoration
Verbal transformation
Sinewave speech
Backward speech

Question 19

What are context effects?

Answer 19

Have people wear headphones and then present a noise - asked people to identify as many words as possible
Presented in noise: some sentences syntactically and semantically correct, syntactically correct but not semantically correct, and syntactically and semantically incorrect
People did the best when the sentences were syntactically and semantically correct and the worst when both were incorrect

Question 20

What is phonemic restoration?

Answer 20

People hear the phoneme that is removed from a word if it is replaced by something - people restore it
Multiple restorations are possible

Question 21

Prosody

Answer 21

the music of language

Question 22

Prosodic factors

Answer 22

Affect the overall utterance meaning

Stress, intonation, tone, rate/length, pausing