Speech perception Flashcards
Difficulties with speech perception
Speed
Invariance (same phoneme can sound different depending on the context in which it occurs)
Variability between listeners
Degraded speech (environmental noise)
Speech segmentation (perceiving when a word within a spoken sentence begins and ends).
McGurk effect
Perceptual phenomenon demonstrating interaction between hearing and vision in speech perception. Occurs when auditory component of one sound is paired with the visual component of another sound leading to perception of a third sound.
Assimilation
Phonemes take on acoustic properties of neighbouring phonemes eg: B in ‘bill’, ‘bull’ and ‘bell’ are slightly different and tell us about what is coming next.
Co-articulation
The way in which a phoneme is produced is influenced by the preceding and following phonemes.
How do we divide speech stream?
Word constraint (use our knowledge about words to segment what we hear to words that make sense to us)
Co-articulation can help predict what word is coming next.
Segmentation
Segmentation
Stress-based segmentation
Syllable-based segmentation
What is meant by categorical perception?
Speech stimuli intermediate between two phonemes is either categorised as one or the other.
Lexical identification shift
Ambiguous initial phonemes were more likely to be assigned to a given phoneme category when doing so produces a word.
Uniqueness point
Where it becomes clear what that word is because there are no other words starting in that way.
Isolation point
Point in a word where a proportion of listeners identify the word correctly, but may not be confident about it. Typically earlier than uniqueness point but biased by the context.
Lexical access
Point at which all information about a word—phonological, semantic, syntactic, pragmatic—becomes available following recognition.
Integration
Start of the comprehension process proper. Semantic, and synctactic properties are integrated into the higher level sentence representation.
Stuttering
Repetition of prolongation of certain phonemes disrupting the flow of speech. Involuntary pauses can also occur.
How we plan speech in communication. Two positions that speaker may take:
- the initial design model
- the monitoring and adjustment model
The initial design model: the speaker’s initial plan for utterance takes full account of the common ground with the listener.
The monitoring and adjustment model: Initially speaker plans what going to say on basis of information available to them without considering listener’s perspective. Then they monitor and correct their plans to take account of the common ground. Most of the time we use the monitoring and adjustment model.
How do we establish common ground?
Shared responsibility: Speaker assumes listener will ask questions if not sure about common ground
Cognitive overload: Speaker tries to keep track of own knowledge and that of the listener. This requires excessive cognitive processing.
