Speech Perception

Question 1

What are the main processes of speech perception and comprehension?

Answer 1

Phoneme (a basic unit of sound) and Allophone (variant form of phoneme e.g. p in spit or pit)

Question 2

• add in info about graph

Question 3

What is categorical perception?

Answer 3

Intermediate sounds are categorised as one phoneme or another. Some evidence of categorical perception in music but weaker in speech.

Question 4

Is there distinctive brain regions associated with speech and music perception?

Answer 4

Yes there are

Question 5

What can occur in some brain-damaged patients?

Answer 5

They have intact speech perception but impaired music perception and vice versa

Question 6

What did early lesion studies find?

Answer 6

They related information on damaged areas to behaviour and recognised that these areas are specialised for language production and comprehension.

Question 7

What did Penfield and Roberts study?

Answer 7

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

Question 8

What is the McGurk Effect?

Answer 8

Video saying ‘ba’, voice saying ‘ga’ and participants report hearing ‘da’. Shows how lip reading influences speech perception

Question 9

What did Isper et al find?

Answer 9

The McGurk effect is strongest when visual input 100 ms ahead of auditory input. Lip movements allow listeners to predict the next sound.

Question 10

How does the interactionist account affect speech perception?

Answer 10

Context influences early stages of speech perception, strong top down effects

Question 11

What does the autonomous account influence?

Answer 11

Late stages of speech perception after word recognition

Question 12

What did Brock and Nation do in their context effects experiment?

Answer 12

Listeners heard a sentence -> how rapidly did sentence context prevent them fixating an object not mentioned in it?

Question 13

What is an example of competitor constraining in Brock and Nation?

Answer 13

Alex fastened the button - butter

Question 14

What is an example of competitor neutral?

Answer 14

Alex chose the button - butter. Acoustic similar between button and butter, eye track gazing at critical word onset.

Question 15

What is an example of target neutral?

Answer 15

The button is displayed so easy disambiguation between button vs butter

Question 16

What is competitor constraining?

Answer 16

Context provides weak information to disambiguate button vs butter to avoid gazing at butter competitor

Question 17

What is competitor information?

Answer 17

Strong information

Question 18

What is competitor unrelated?

Answer 18

Weak information but in display

Question 19

What are the results of Brock and Nation?

Answer 19

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)

Question 20

What is the phonemic restoration effect?

Answer 20

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.

Question 21

What does the phonemic restoration effect demonstrate?

Answer 21

The brain’s ability to use context and prior knowledge to reconstruct incomplete auditory information - consistent with interactionist account

Question 22

What is the ganong effect?

Answer 22

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

Question 23

What is an example of the ganong effect?

Answer 23

Between DASH and TASH, listeners are more likely to perceive the ambiguous sound as fitting the real word DASH over the non-word

Question 24

What does the ganong effect highlight?

Answer 24

How lexical context shapes speech perception very rapidly -> interactionist account