Speech recognition

Question 1

Acoustic signal

Answer 1

Speech sounds or patterns of pressure changes

Question 2

Articulators

Answer 2

Structures involed in speech production, including lips, teeth, tongue, jaw, soft palate

Question 3

Sound spectrogram

Answer 3

Graph depicting intensity of speech sound frequencies
Y-axis - frequency
X-axis - sound produced
Intensity indicated by darkness

Question 4

Formants

Answer 4

Frequencies at which sound intensity peaks occur

Question 5

Formant transition

Answer 5

Rapid shifts in frequency preceding or following formants

Question 6

Manner of articulation

Answer 6

How a speech sound is produced by the interaction of articulators

Question 7

Place of articulation

Answer 7

Locations of articulation during speech sound

Question 8

Phoneme

Answer 8

Smallest unit of sound that, if changed, would change the meaning of a word

Question 9

What are the three causes of speech acoustic signal variability?

Answer 9

Coarticulation
Sloppy pronunciation
Individual differences

Question 10

Coarticulation

Answer 10

Overlap between the articulation of neighbouring phenomes

Question 11

Categorical perception

Answer 11

When stimuli existing along a continuum are perceived as divided into discrete categories

Question 12

Vocal onset time

Answer 12

Time delay between when a speech sound begins and when the vocal chords begin vibrating

Question 13

Phonetic boundary

Answer 13

VOT at which the percept of a sound changes categories (e.g., “da” to “ta” as VOT passes 40 ms)

Question 14

Multimodal

Answer 14

The involvment of multiple sense in determining speech perception

Question 15

Categorical perception experiment

Answer 15

Test to discern a sound’s phonetic boundary

Question 16

Discrimination test

Answer 16

Part of a categorical perception test, in which the VOTs of two stimuli are simultaneously raised until they are on opposite sides of the phonetic boundary

Question 17

McGurk effect/audiovisual speech perception

Answer 17

The effect of visual perception on the perception of speech sound

Question 18

Phonemic restoration effect

Answer 18

When an obscured phenome of a word is restored in the perception of the word

Question 19

Shadowing

Answer 19

Experimental technique in which listeners repeat aloud what they hear through earphones as they hear it

Question 20

How do listeners decode speech into words and meanings?

Answer 20

Previous knowledge of words and meanings to perceive words in sentences
Speech segmentation via knowing transitional probabilities
Experiential learning (“pop-out” effect) to preceive degraded speech

Question 21

Speech segmentation

Answer 21

Process of decoding words from continuous acoustic signal (perceiving breaks between continuous words)

Question 22

Transitional probabilities

Answer 22

The chances that one sound will follow another sound

Question 23

Transitional learning

Answer 23

The process of learning about transitional probabilities from an early age

Question 24

Noise-vocoded speech

Answer 24

Experimental technique in which speech signal is divided into frequency bands and then noise is added to each band

Question 25

“Pop-out” effect

Answer 25

Ability to hear previously unintelligible words

Question 26

Broca’s area

Answer 26

Area in left frontal lobe associated with language grammar and structure

Question 27

Broca’s aphasia

Answer 27

Condition caused by damage to Broca’s area associated with difficulty producing speech (slow, labored, and jumbled). Difficulty understanding speech whose meaning depends on word order

Question 28

Wernicke’s area

Answer 28

Area in tempora lobe associated with speech recognition

Question 29

Wernicke’s aphasia

Answer 29

Condition caused by damage to Wernicke’s area characterized by inability to produce or understand meaningful speech (more profound than Broca’s aphasia, despite production of fluent “nonsensical” syllables)

Question 30

Word deafness

Answer 30

Extreme Wernicke’s aphasia characterized by complete inability to recognize words

Question 31

Voice cells

Answer 31

Neurons in “voice area” - section of STS - that respond most strongly to human voices

Question 32

Describe the two streams identified in the dual-stream model for speech perception

Answer 32

“What” (ventral) pathway - anterior auditory cortex to frontal lobe. Responsible for recognizing speech
“Where” (dorsal) pathway - posterior auditory cortex to parietal lobe to motor cortex. Responsible for connecting speech syllables to motor movements

Question 33

Phonetic features

Answer 33

Cues associated with the unique motor movements used to produce a phenome - connected to specific neurons

Question 34

Motor theory of speech perception

Answer 34

Theory proposing perception of speech depends: first, on activation of motor mechanisms; and second, on activation of additional perception mechanisms

Question 35

Audiovisual mirror neurons

Answer 35

Neurons observed in monkeys that activate both when performing an action that produces a sound and when hearing the sound of someone else carrying out the same action

Question 36

Define and describe an example of experience-dependent plasticity

Answer 36

A change in the brain’s ability to respond to specific stimuli that occurs as a result of experience
Age-dependent reduction in ability of infants to discriminate sounds of foreign langauges

Question 37

Social-gating hypothesis

Answer 37

Theory of language learning postulating that learning is “gated” by social brain (social interaction necessary for learning)

Question 38

Motor theory of perception study (Liberman et al.)

Answer 38

Using TMS, slimulated different brain areas associated with different articulators; responding improved for phonemes that corresponded to stimulated area