Speech Perception Flashcards
What are the main processes of speech perception and comprehension?
Phoneme (a basic unit of sound) and Allophone (variant form of phoneme e.g. p in spit or pit)
- add in info about graph
What is categorical perception?
Intermediate sounds are categorised as one phoneme or another. Some evidence of categorical perception in music but weaker in speech.
Is there distinctive brain regions associated with speech and music perception?
Yes there are
What can occur in some brain-damaged patients?
They have intact speech perception but impaired music perception and vice versa
What did early lesion studies find?
They related information on damaged areas to behaviour and recognised that these areas are specialised for language production and comprehension.
What did Penfield and Roberts study?
Studied the effects of electrical stimulation on the brains of epilepsy patients. Information on this came from studies recording neuronal activity in the auditory cortex of monkeys
What is the McGurk Effect?
Video saying ‘ba’, voice saying ‘ga’ and participants report hearing ‘da’. Shows how lip reading influences speech perception
What did Isper et al find?
The McGurk effect is strongest when visual input 100 ms ahead of auditory input. Lip movements allow listeners to predict the next sound.
How does the interactionist account affect speech perception?
Context influences early stages of speech perception, strong top down effects
What does the autonomous account influence?
Late stages of speech perception after word recognition
What did Brock and Nation do in their context effects experiment?
Listeners heard a sentence -> how rapidly did sentence context prevent them fixating an object not mentioned in it?
What is an example of competitor constraining in Brock and Nation?
Alex fastened the button - butter
What is an example of competitor neutral?
Alex chose the button - butter. Acoustic similar between button and butter, eye track gazing at critical word onset.
What is an example of target neutral?
The button is displayed so easy disambiguation between button vs butter
What is competitor constraining?
Context provides weak information to disambiguate button vs butter to avoid gazing at butter competitor
What is competitor information?
Strong information
What is competitor unrelated?
Weak information but in display
What are the results of Brock and Nation?
Listeners rapidly used strong context (competitor constraining conditions) to avoid fixating on butter. Listeners less likely to fixate an object improbable in sentence context (competitor consisting)
What is the phonemic restoration effect?
Listeners perceive missing sounds in a word or sentence when these sounds are masked by meaningless sound e.g cough. The brain fills in the missing phoneme based on context, allowing the listener to understand the full word seamlessly.
What does the phonemic restoration effect demonstrate?
The brain’s ability to use context and prior knowledge to reconstruct incomplete auditory information - consistent with interactionist account
What is the ganong effect?
Listener’s interpretation. of ambiguous speech sounds is influenced by real-word knowledge, biasing them towards perceiving sounds as part of a familiar word rather than a non-word
What is an example of the ganong effect?
Between DASH and TASH, listeners are more likely to perceive the ambiguous sound as fitting the real word DASH over the non-word
What does the ganong effect highlight?
How lexical context shapes speech perception very rapidly -> interactionist account
