Speech perception and reading Flashcards
What are prosodic cues?
Cues in speech that serve as hints to sentence structure and intended meaning.
The ‘linearity problem’
The difficulties of speech perception produced by co-articulation.
The ‘segmentation problem’
Deciding how the continuous stream of sound should be segmented into words.
What are ‘formants’?
Frequency bands emphasized by the vocal apparatus when saying a phoneme.
The sound frequencies of vowels vs consonants.
Most vowels are below 1200 Hz most consonants above 2400Hz.
the phonemic restoration effect
‘filling in the blanks’; Samuel (1990) concluded that contextual information (when this effect is observed) influences the listener’s expectations in a top-down fashion, but these expectations then need to be confirmed with reference to the sound that is actually presented.
the ‘McGurk effect’
in speech perception - the blending of auditory and lip-movement information
Cohort theory of spoken word recognition
Marslen-Wilson & Tyler (1980) - various knowledge sources (lexical, syntactic, semantic) interact and combine with each other in complex ways to produce an efficient analysis of spoken language
The 5 components of Ellis & Young’s (1988) spoken word processing model.
- auditory analysis system
- auditory input lexicon
- semantic system
- speech output lexicon
- phoneme response buffer
‘pure word deafness’
Parking (1996) - impaired speech perception but intact speech production, reading, and writing, hypothesized to be caused by damage to the auditory analysis system
‘word meaning deafness’
Route 2 is intact, but routes 1 & 3 are severely impaired: able to repeat familiar words, but often not understand their meaning; much better at repeating words than non-words
‘auditory phonological agnosia’
damage to route 3: good ability to perceive and understand spoken familiar words, but impaired at perceiving and repeating unfamiliar and non-words
‘deep dysphasia’
patients make semantic errors when asked to repeat spoken words (saying words that are related in meaning); find it harder to read abstract words, & very poor ability to repeat non-words
perceptual span
effective field of view during reading
Reyner & Sereno’s (1994) three types of reading span:
- The total perceptual span (the total area from which useful information is extracted); this is the longest span.
- The letter-identification span (the area from which information is obtained).
- The word-identification span (the area from which information relevant to word-identification processes is obtained); this is the shortest span.
The E-Z Reader model
Reichle et al. (1998) - about 80% of content words are fixated, compared to only about 20% of function words; common, predictable, or short words are more likely to be skipped over, because their lexical access has been completed while the current word is still being fixated
the semantic priming effect
word identification on the lexical decision task is faster when the word is preceded by a semantically related word
context effects on word recognition
two effects are commonly seen: the semantic priming effect, which is stronger, and the effect of expectation (told that smth should follow);
semantically related unexpected prime facilitates recognition more than semantically unrelated but expected primes
The interactive activation model
McClelland & Rumelhart (1981) - Visual word recognition involves a process of mutual constraint satisfaction between the bottom-up information gained about the features in the words and the top-down knowledge about word and letter identities;
feature level - letter level - word level
‘surface dyslexia’
a condition in which patients have particular problems in reading irregular words
The three routes of reading (in the dual-route model :)
Route 1 - grapheme-phoneme conversion
Route 2 - lexicon + semantic system
Route 3 - lexicon only
however the fundamental distinction is between reading based on a lexical or dictionary look-up procedure and reading based on a letter-to-sound procedure
‘phonological dyslexia’
a condition in which there are particular problems with reading unfamiliar words and non-words; patients successfully use route 2, but route 1 is impaired
‘deep dyslexia’
a condition in which there are particular problems in reading unfamiliar words, and in which there are semantic reading errors (e.g., “ship” read as “boat”)
Is word naming better predicted by regularity (dual-route model) or by consistency (connectionist)?
By consistency (Glushko, 1979)
