Speech perception and reading

Question 1

What are prosodic cues?

Answer 1

Cues in speech that serve as hints to sentence structure and intended meaning.

Question 2

The ‘linearity problem’

Answer 2

The difficulties of speech perception produced by co-articulation.

Question 3

The ‘segmentation problem’

Answer 3

Deciding how the continuous stream of sound should be segmented into words.

Question 4

What are ‘formants’?

Answer 4

Frequency bands emphasized by the vocal apparatus when saying a phoneme.

Question 5

The sound frequencies of vowels vs consonants.

Answer 5

Most vowels are below 1200 Hz most consonants above 2400Hz.

Question 6

the phonemic restoration effect

Answer 6

‘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.

Question 7

the ‘McGurk effect’

Answer 7

in speech perception - the blending of auditory and lip-movement information

Question 8

Cohort theory of spoken word recognition

Answer 8

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

Question 9

The 5 components of Ellis & Young’s (1988) spoken word processing model.

Answer 9

• auditory analysis system
• auditory input lexicon
• semantic system
• speech output lexicon
• phoneme response buffer

Question 10

‘pure word deafness’

Answer 10

Parking (1996) - impaired speech perception but intact speech production, reading, and writing, hypothesized to be caused by damage to the auditory analysis system

Question 11

‘word meaning deafness’

Answer 11

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

Question 12

‘auditory phonological agnosia’

Answer 12

damage to route 3: good ability to perceive and understand spoken familiar words, but impaired at perceiving and repeating unfamiliar and non-words

Question 13

‘deep dysphasia’

Answer 13

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

Question 14

perceptual span

Answer 14

effective field of view during reading

Question 15

Reyner & Sereno’s (1994) three types of reading span:

Answer 15

• 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.

Question 16

The E-Z Reader model

Answer 16

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

Question 17

the semantic priming effect

Answer 17

word identification on the lexical decision task is faster when the word is preceded by a semantically related word

Question 18

context effects on word recognition

Answer 18

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

Question 19

The interactive activation model

Answer 19

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

Question 20

‘surface dyslexia’

Answer 20

a condition in which patients have particular problems in reading irregular words

Question 21

The three routes of reading (in the dual-route model :)

Answer 21

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

Question 22

‘phonological dyslexia’

Answer 22

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

Question 23

‘deep dyslexia’

Answer 23

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”)

Question 24

Is word naming better predicted by regularity (dual-route model) or by consistency (connectionist)?

Answer 24

By consistency (Glushko, 1979)