Speech Perception Lecture 21 Flashcards

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1
Q

What is the acoustic signal/stimulus?

A
  • stimulus for speech
  • produced by air that is pushed up from the lungs –> vocal cords –> vocal tract
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2
Q

What are vowels?

A

produced by vibration of the vocal cords that accompany changes in the shape of the vocal tract

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3
Q

What are articulators?

A
  • tongue, lips, teeth, jaw, soft palate
  • cause vowel changes
  • change the resonant frequency of the vocal system
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4
Q

What are formants?

A

peaks in pressure at a number of frequencies

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5
Q

Each vowel is associated with a characteristic series of ____________.

A

formants

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6
Q

TRUE or FALSE: the formant with the highest frequency is called the first formant (F1)

A

FALSE: LOWEST frequency = FIRST formant

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7
Q

What can be used to visualize formants?

A

sound spectrograms

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8
Q

What are consonants?

A

produced by constrictions of the vocal tract

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9
Q

what are formant transitions?

A

rapid changes in frequency preceding or following consonants

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10
Q

What are the smallest building blocks of speech?

A

phonemes

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11
Q

What are phonemes?

A

the smallest unit of speech capable of changing the meaning of a word

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12
Q

what is lack of invariance?

A

while words are build by putting together phonemes in different combinations, the acoustic signal produced for any given phoneme is variable

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13
Q

What is an example of perceptual constancy pertaining to speech?

A

our perceptual systems can still recognize differing acoustic signals as representing the same phenome

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14
Q

What is coarticulation?

A

the sound produced by a single phoneme can be different depending on what phoneme comes before and after it

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15
Q

What is an example of coarticulation?

A

we perceive the ‘b’ sound in bat and boot as the same sound although our mouth shape changes (which affects the acoustic signal)

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16
Q

TRUE or FALSE: formants are associated with vowels; formant transitions are associated with consonants

A

TRUE

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17
Q

What is an example of variability in acoustic signal?

A

sloppy pronunciation

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18
Q

What is categorical perception?

A

wide range of acoustic cues results in the perception of a limited number of sound categories

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19
Q

What is the McGurk effect?

A

visual input changes speech perception

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20
Q

The ____________ was found to be activated for all speech stimuli, though familiar (but not unfamiliar) voices also activate the _____________.

A

STS, FFA

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21
Q

What is the physiological basis for a link between speech perception and facial processing?

A

The STS was found to be activated for all speech stimuli, though familiar (but not unfamiliar) voices also activate the FFA.

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22
Q

Phonemes are more easily perceived when _______________________.

A

they appear in a meaningful context

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23
Q

What is the phonemic restoration effect?

A

missing phonemes can also be filled in based on expectations

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24
Q

TRUE or FALSE: participants could accurately place where the cough occurred, but could NOT recognize the missing phoneme that was removed

A

FALSE: unable to place cough, nor recognize missing phoneme

25
Q

what does it mean to shadow in terms of speech experiments?

A

listen with headphones and repeat aloud what is heard

26
Q

What 3 kinds of sentences were participants asked to shadow in Miller and Isard’s 1963 experiment?

A
  1. grammatically correct sentences
  2. anomalous sentences that correctly follow grammatical rules but do not make sense
  3. ungrammatical strings of words
27
Q

What results show that prior knowledge on the perception of linguistic representations can enhance ability to recognize words?

A

high accuracy for shadowing grammatically correct sentence (> anomalous > ungrammatical)

28
Q

What is the segmentation problem?

A
  • because there are no physical breaks in the continuous acoustic signal, speech segmentation (perceiving individual words) can be a challenge
  • e.g. how do we distinguis ‘ice cream’ from ‘I scream’
29
Q

TRUE or FALSE: listening to a foreign language makes the segmentation problem more obvious

A

TRUE

30
Q

What is transitional probability? Example?

A
  • the chance that one sound will follow another in a language
  • e.g. English speakers expect at least one vowel to occur after every few consonants or so
31
Q

HOw do we learn associations of transitional probability?

A

statistical learning

32
Q

What is noise-vocoded speech?

A

method to add noise to an acoustic signal

33
Q

Describe Davis et al. 2005 study using noise-vocoded speech? what did it show?

A
  • participants asked to identify words perceived in eacch sentence (with added noise)
  • accuracy close to 0% for first sentence, gradually increased across sentence number
  • additional info provided by preceding sentences provide context (lead to pop-out effects)
  • TOP-DOWN PROCESSING in perceiving language
34
Q

What is the motor theory of speech perception?

A

even if physical properties of the acoustic signal changes depending on speaker, coarticulation, etc., if everyone produces phonemes using the same mouth movements, maybe our perceptual system can use motor reps as a stable form of phoneme rep

35
Q

TRUE or FALSE: MOUTH movements involve changing the configuration of ARTICULATORS, which modify the shape of the VOCAL TRACT, and changes RESONANCE properties

A

TRUE

36
Q

What did we learn from using TMS on motor regions during speech recognition?

A

stimulation in lip movement areas sped up responses to sounds of speech

37
Q

What was discovered by using fMRI to investigate distinct vs overlapping networks in speech perception?

A

there are both different AND overlapping regions for speech production AND comprehension

38
Q

what suggest possibility of shared mechanisms between speech production and comprehension, using fMRI?

A
  • TIME COURSE for production and comprehension were similar
  • REGIONS for production and comprehension overlap in activation
39
Q

TRUE or FALSE: networks supporting production and comprehension are unified

A

FALSE: there are models supporting that they are both SEPARATE AND UNIFIED

40
Q

Patients with Broca’s aphasia have slow and jumbled speech which relate to general deficit in _____________.

A

processing sentence structure (grammar, syntax, etc.)

41
Q

Which sentence would be problematic for someone with broca’s aphasia? Why?

  1. The apple was eaten by the girl.
  2. The boy was pushed by the girl.
A
  • the BOY was PUSHED by the girl
  • need to rely on more than just key words (also grammar) to understand the sentence (i.e. who pushed who?)
42
Q

TRUE or FALSE: individuals with Broca’s aphasia can also have comprehension problems

A

TRUE

43
Q

Patients with Wernicke’s aphasia can speak fluently and form grammatically correct sentences, but _____________.

A

the content is disorganized and not meaningful

44
Q

Comprehension difficulty in patients with Wernicke’s aphasia may be associated with ___________.

A

word deafness

45
Q

What is word deafness?

A

inability to recognize words

46
Q

A voice area in the ______________ has been identified that is activated more strongly by voices than other sounds.

A

STS

47
Q

What do voice cells in temporal lobe of monkeys respond more strongly to?

A

monkey calls (vs other animals)

48
Q

In the temporal lobe, single-cell recordings have located neurons in humans that respond more strongly to ____________/

A

phonemes

49
Q

What are phonetic features that neurons in the temporal lobe respond to?

A
  • manner of articulation
  • place of articulation
50
Q

What is manner of articulation?

A

what you actually do with your articulators

51
Q

what is place of articulation?

A

where in your mouth the articulators are manipulated

52
Q

Describe the dual stream model of speech perception.

A
  • ventral = DENTIFYING sounds of speech
  • dorsal = REPRESENTING MOVEMENTS associated with sounds
53
Q

once voice onset time exceeds ____, da tends to be perceived as ta

A

40 ms

54
Q

Evidence for phonetic boundaries in infants?

A
  • after habituation to baseline phoneme, infants DISHABITUATE to one kind of change (that adults consider a different phenome) but not another change (that adults do not consider as different phenome)
  • dishabituate when VOT 20 ms becomes 40 ms (ba to pa in adults)
  • do NOT dishabituate when VOT 60 ms becomes 80 ms (both pa in adults)
55
Q

TRUE or FALSE: infants ability to discern sounds not commonly used in their native language diminishes

A

TRUE

56
Q

Describe the study that shows infants’ ability to perceive sounds not commonly used in their native language diminishes.

A
  • at 6 months, American and Japanese infants equally good at discriminating ra and la
  • at 12 months, American better, Japanese worse
57
Q

What is experience-dependent plasticity?

A

we get better at what we practice, and become worse at what we don’t

58
Q

What is the social gating hypothesis?

A

our brain gates specific mechanisms that are important/required for speaking particular languages