Spoken language

Question 1

What is the McGurk effect?

Answer 1

We can help but to lip read (ba vs ga)

Question 2

Which 5 problems does a listener face?

Answer 2

1) language is fast: 10-20 phonemes (basic speech sounds) per second
2) Segmentation problem: difficult to separate words from speech sounds patterns
3) Co-articulation: overlapping of phonomes (ie phoneme produced depends on previous phoneme - ie bill/bell)
4) Individual differences between speakers
5) Degraded speech (ie more people talk at the same time) - ambiguity

Question 3

How do we search for words?

Answer 3

Lexical route: sentential context –> Lexical knowledge
Sub-lexical: Phonotactics acoustics (segmental) and word stress (metrical prosody)

• Tier 2 only if tier 1 not work etc

Question 4

What is the categorical perception?

Answer 4

Speech stimuli between 2 phonemes typically categorised as 1 or the other (ie l and r same phoneme in japanese)

Question 5

What are the context effects

Answer 5

• lexical identification shift: Ganong effect:effect of context on categorical perception (phoneme more likely to be identified when producing a word)
  shadowing: ‘please say shop’ heard as ‘please say chop’ if pause between say and shop (because you have to in order to say chop) –> rapid contextual use in listening
• phoneme restoration: small potion of word has been blurred, sentence context restored phoneme (ie *eel on shoe vs *eel on orange) - produced by direct effect (phoneme processed as if it was there) or indirect (guessed - later ruled out)

Question 6

What is the cohort model?

Answer 6

parallel processing of words - lexical, syntactic, semantic:

1) word conforming to sound sequence become active
2) words belonging to above cohort eliminated if they cease to match further info
3) processing continues until contextual info sufficient

Question 7

What is TRACE?

Answer 7

Assumes that bottom-up and top-down interact –> all sources used at the same time through different levels of nodes.
3 layers of units: phonetic feature, phonemes, words

Question 8

What is Brocca’s aphasia?

Answer 8

• Slow, non-fluent speech
• poor ability to produce syntactically correct sentences
• speech comprehension intact

Question 9

What is Wernicke’s aphasia?

Answer 9

• Fluent and correct grammatical language

- Lack of meaning in speech and comprehension

Question 10

What is semantic and phonological anomia?

Answer 10

anomia = impaired ability to name objects.

phonological: problems in word-form selection (can’t find appropriate phonological form of word)
semantic: problems in lemma or abstract words (meanings similar to correct word)

Question 11

What is lemmas?

Answer 11

Abstract words processing syntactic and semantic features but not phonological ones (ie you know what the word is, but can’t pronounce it - you have accessed its lemma)

Question 12

What is the WEAVER ++ approach (Levelt)

Answer 12

= word form encoding by activation and verification:

• feed-forward activation-spreading network (ie not backwards) processing proceeds from meaning to sound
• 3 levels: 1) lexical concepts, 2) lemmas 3) word forms (morphemes)
• Speech production involves stages following each other serially
• speech errors avoided by means of checking mechanism

Question 13

What is the spreading activation model?

Answer 13

4 levels:

1) semantic (meaning/message)
2) syntactic (grammatical structure)
3) Morphological level (morphemes (units of meanings))
4) Phonological (phonemes (basic units of sound))