Speech Perception Flashcards
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Acoustic signal
noises that animals produce in response to a specific stimulus or situation, and that have a specific meaning
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Aphasias
an impairment of language, affecting the production or comprehension of speech and the ability to read or write
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Articulator
any of the vocal organs above the larynx, including the tongue, lips, teeth, and hard palate
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Audiovisual speech perception
visual information from a talker’s face during mouth articulation is available before the onset of the corresponding audio speech, and thereby allows the perceiver to use visual information to predict the upcoming audio
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Broca’s aphasia
a type of aphasia characterized by partial loss of the ability to produce language (spoken, manual, or written), although comprehension generally remains intact
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Broca’s area
a region in the frontal lobe of the dominant hemisphere, usually the left, of the brain with functions linked to speech production
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Categorical perception
a phenomenon of perception of distinct categories when there is a gradual change in a variable along a continuum. It was originally observed for auditory stimuli but now found to be applicable to other perceptual modalities
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Coarticulation
the articulation of two or more speech sounds together, so that one influences the other
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Formant transitions
The rapid change in frequency of a formant for a vowel immediately before or after a consonant
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Formants
a concentration of acoustic energy around a particular frequency in the speech wave
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Manner of articulation
the configuration and interaction of the articulators (speech organs such as the tongue, lips, and palate) when making a speech sound
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McGurk effect
a perceptual phenomenon that demonstrates an interaction between hearing and vision in speech perception
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Motor theory of speech perception
the hypothesis that people perceive spoken words by identifying the vocal tract gestures with which they are pronounced rather than by identifying the sound patterns that speech generates.
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Multimodal
characterized by several different modes of activity or occurrence
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Noise-vocoded speech
conveying phonetic information primarily through temporal-envelope cues rather than spectral cues
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Phoneme
any of the perceptually distinct units of sound in a specified language that distinguish one word from another, for example p, b, d, and t in the English words pad, pat, bad, and bat.
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Phonemic restoration effect
a perceptual phenomenon where under certain conditions, sounds actually missing from a speech signal can be restored by the brain and may appear to be heard
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Place of articulation
the point of contact where an obstruction occurs in the vocal tract between an articulatory gesture, an active articulator (typically some part of the tongue), and a passive location (typically some part of the roof of the mouth)
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Shadowing
an experimental technique in which subjects repeat speech immediately after hearing it
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Social gating hypothesis
suggests that social interaction creates an optimal learning environment for infants, an environment that introduces learning through social context.
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Sound spectrogram
a visual representation of the spectrum of frequencies of a signal as it varies with time
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Speech segmentation
the process of identifying the boundaries between words, syllables, or phonemes in spoken natural languages
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Statistical learning
the ability for humans and other animals to extract statistical regularities from the world around them to learn about the environment
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Transitional probabilities
a term primarily used in mathematics and is used to describe actions and reactions to what is called the “Markov Chain.”
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Voice onset time (VOT)
a feature of the production of stop consonants. It is defined as the length of time that passes between the release of a stop consonant and the onset of voicing, the vibration of the vocal folds, or, according to other authors, periodicity
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Wernicke’s aphasia
a type of aphasia in which individuals have difficulty understanding written and spoken language
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Wernicke’s area
a region of the brain concerned with the comprehension of language, located in the cortex of the dominant temporal lobe
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Word deafness
inability to comprehend the meanings of words though they are heard, caused by lesions of the auditory center of the brain
Definition
noises that animals produce in response to a specific stimulus or situation, and that have a specific meaning
Acoustic signal
Definition
an impairment of language, affecting the production or comprehension of speech and the ability to read or write
Aphasias
Definition
any of the vocal organs above the larynx, including the tongue, lips, teeth, and hard palate
Articulator
What is this diagram describing?
Left: the shape of the vocal tract for the vowels /I/ and /oo/. Right: the amplitude of the pressure changes produced for each vowel. The peaks in the pressure changes are the formants. Each vowel sound has a characteristic pattern of formants that is determined by the shape of the vocal tract for that vowel. (Denes and E. N. Pinson, 1993)
What is this graph describing?
The results of a categorical perception experiment indicate that /da/ is perceived for VOTs to the left of the phonetic boundary, and that /ta/ is perceived at VOTs to the right of the phonetic boundary. (From Eimas & Corbit, 1973)
What is this diagram describing?
Speech perception is the result of top-down processing (based on knowledge and meaning) and bottom-up processing (based on the acoustic signal) working together.
What is this image describing?
The dual-stream model of speech perception proposes a ventral pathway that is responsible for recognizing speech and a dorsal pathway that links the acoustic signal and motor movements. The blue areas are associated with the dorsal pathway; the yellow area with the ventral pathway. The red and green areas are also involved in the analysis of speech stimuli. (Adapted from Hickock and Poeppel, 2007).
