Speech perception (Nicolas)

Question 1

How many syllables in speech/second?

Answer 1

4-5 per second - a fast articulation rate

Question 2

How is speech variable?

Answer 2

Every word takes on a different acoustic shape each time it’s uttered.

Question 3

How does emotional personality or mode effect speech articulation?

Answer 3

Emotional personality can affect rhythm, melody and amplitude of speech.

Speak in different modes e.g., whispered, creaky or voiced

Question 4

What is coarticulation?

Answer 4

Individual phonemes influenced by preceding/upcoming segments

Question 5

How is speech quasi-continuous?

Answer 5

No unique/systematic way to flag word boundaries (rarely a silence between 2 words).

Question 6

How is speech lexically ambiguous?

Answer 6

How do know how to say ‘captain’ is not simply ‘cap’ and another word - can’t infer pronunciation

Question 7

How is speech audio-visual?

Answer 7

Visual info by lips and adjacent areas of the face about articulation integral to speech perception. Auditory information supports ambiguous visual information.

Question 8

What is the McGurk effect?

Answer 8

Supports the audio-visual model. For example, the ‘ga’ sound is further back and also looks like ‘da’ visually - to solve this illusion, must combine ambiguous visual information with auditory information.

Question 9

How do phonemes help word recognition?

Answer 9

Help understand building blocks of vocabulary and individual sounds of language. E.g., distinction between ‘bat’ and ‘mat’.

Question 10

What is supra-phonemic information?

Answer 10

Variation in pitch, frequency, and rhythm (where you put the accent) - can give information about the emotion of the speaker.

Question 11

How do we perceive speech as mental categories?

Answer 11

If you take 2 sounds that sound similar, seems to be a boarder that helps us distinguish between the 2.

From sampling your innate language, can understand clear-cut boundaries between different sounds e.g., ‘guh’ and ‘kuh’

Question 12

When are sound categories created?

Answer 12

Over the first year of life

Question 13

How did Werker and Tees (1984) test American English speaking?

Answer 13

Tested new borns + infants from the American English language and found that could perceive Hindi and Salish contrasts.

Question 14

How did Weker & Tees (1984) measure these mental categories?

Answer 14

Child had to turn their head towards a teddy bear whilst listening to one sound then change to another sound. There was no predictability to when the sound would change but would change before the teddy bear appeared.
- If the child picked up on the sound change, would want to look at the teddy bear as cues change in tone

Question 15

At what age can exposure show a child’s ability to distinguish between sounds?

Answer 15

Exposure from 6-10 months, exposure shows ability to show any sound distinction up to 10-12 months

Question 16

How is speech mapped onto the words we know?

Answer 16

Through lexical access - trained to access word memories by their first sound e.g., ‘p’ and ‘person’ instead of ‘cat’

Question 17

How do these auditory memories for words work?

Answer 17

Open up only if their initial sound is perceived

Question 18

What is ‘left to right’ processing?

Answer 18

First few sounds of a word carry the most informational weight e.g., ‘cathe’ to cathedral.

Question 19

How did Allopenna et al (1998) assess this speech mapping?

Answer 19

Looked at where the listener fixates on the screen to determine which word was being evoked by the incoming speech.

Found the more fixations of the onset of overlapping words than rhyme-overlapping words.

Question 20

What is the Cohort model? (Marslem-Wilson & Welsh, 1978)

Answer 20

As you hear more of the word, the actual word becomes clearer and you’ll remove alternative words.

Question 21

What are sound-overlapping memories?

Answer 21

Succeed and seed are necessarily enemies of another - words might suppress another.

E.g., captain has the word cap embedded in it - won’t perceive both at the same time so suppresses the other from reaching consciousness - makes perception more difficult.

Question 22

How can you extract words from a signal?

Answer 22

Using cues e.g. great ape and grey tape - the ‘t’ sound changes depending on where it is located - determined by how you articulate the first sound.