Speech perception (Nicolas) Flashcards
How many syllables in speech/second?
4-5 per second - a fast articulation rate
How is speech variable?
Every word takes on a different acoustic shape each time it’s uttered.
How does emotional personality or mode effect speech articulation?
Emotional personality can affect rhythm, melody and amplitude of speech.
Speak in different modes e.g., whispered, creaky or voiced
What is coarticulation?
Individual phonemes influenced by preceding/upcoming segments
How is speech quasi-continuous?
No unique/systematic way to flag word boundaries (rarely a silence between 2 words).
How is speech lexically ambiguous?
How do know how to say ‘captain’ is not simply ‘cap’ and another word - can’t infer pronunciation
How is speech audio-visual?
Visual info by lips and adjacent areas of the face about articulation integral to speech perception. Auditory information supports ambiguous visual information.
What is the McGurk effect?
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.
How do phonemes help word recognition?
Help understand building blocks of vocabulary and individual sounds of language. E.g., distinction between ‘bat’ and ‘mat’.
What is supra-phonemic information?
Variation in pitch, frequency, and rhythm (where you put the accent) - can give information about the emotion of the speaker.
How do we perceive speech as mental categories?
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’
When are sound categories created?
Over the first year of life
How did Werker and Tees (1984) test American English speaking?
Tested new borns + infants from the American English language and found that could perceive Hindi and Salish contrasts.
How did Weker & Tees (1984) measure these mental categories?
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
At what age can exposure show a child’s ability to distinguish between sounds?
Exposure from 6-10 months, exposure shows ability to show any sound distinction up to 10-12 months
How is speech mapped onto the words we know?
Through lexical access - trained to access word memories by their first sound e.g., ‘p’ and ‘person’ instead of ‘cat’
How do these auditory memories for words work?
Open up only if their initial sound is perceived
What is ‘left to right’ processing?
First few sounds of a word carry the most informational weight e.g., ‘cathe’ to cathedral.
How did Allopenna et al (1998) assess this speech mapping?
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.
What is the Cohort model? (Marslem-Wilson & Welsh, 1978)
As you hear more of the word, the actual word becomes clearer and you’ll remove alternative words.
What are sound-overlapping memories?
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.
How can you extract words from a signal?
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.
