Voice & Speech Processing

Question 1

What does the voice reveal about you?

Answer 1

• Voice produced by vocal tract.
• Parameters of you voice are determined by your anatomy.
• Vocal tract vibrates differently depending on emotion
• Voices convey important socio-emotional information

Question 2

What is Principle component Analysis?

Answer 2

social traits are represented as vectors

Question 3

What is Cronbach Alpha and what does it show?

Answer 3

A measure for interrater agreeableness.

Suggests that people consistently agree on whether a voice sounds attractive or confident. We seem to associate voices with social traits on a collective level.

Question 4

How do vocal emotions differ?

Answer 4

• pitch, intensity, tempo
• Some vocal emotions are shared cross cultures
• Others may be influenced by culture- and language-specific factors
• Many emotions have distinct linguistic profiles.

Question 5

Define neural adaptation.

Answer 5

a gradual decrease over time in the responsiveness of the sensory system to a constant stimulus

Question 6

What is a Carry-over design?

Answer 6

• stimulus repeated with same speaker identity but different syllables, or different speaker identity with the same syllable

Question 7

How does the brain respond to speaker identity?

Answer 7

The anterior part of the temporal lobe responds to speaker identity.

Question 8

Is there a different processing pathway for voice?

Answer 8

• There is something about human voices and the emotions that they convey
• Dichotic listening task measuring brain activation showed that activation seen for voices could not be explained by acoustic differences between the stimuli.

Question 9

Are the Voice Areas necessary for voice processing?

Answer 9

• Right temporal TMS impairs voice detection
• TMS to individual Voice Areas impairs accuracy in voice/nonvoice discrimination compared to TMS to the Control Site
• Low-level loudness discrimination is not affected by TMS to the Voice Areas.

Question 10

What is top-down processing

Answer 10

focusses on useful information while suppressing the noise.

Question 11

What is Bottom-up processing?

Answer 11

Takes in all external stimuli

Question 12

What is the neuropsychological evidence for speech processing being left-lateralised?

Answer 12

○ Paul Broca’s two patients can’t speak

○ Carl Wernicke’s patient can’t understand speech

Question 13

What is the fMRI evidence for speech processing being left-lateralised?

Answer 13

○ Left temporal regions responded to intelligible speech more than rotated, unintelligible speech.
○ Right temporal regions responded to spectrally rich speech more than vocoded speech.

Question 14

What is the acoustic uncertainty principle?

Answer 14

Describes a trade-off when trying to measure the energy distribution across time and frequency.

Question 15

What is the Fourier Transform technique?

Answer 15

Fourier Transform technique used to visualise particular signals in terms of the energy at different frequency bands. This is shown in a spectrogram.

Question 16

what is the motor theory of speech?

Answer 16

• speech perception is complemented by speech production.
• Speech perception is informed by top-down predictions from the motor system (predicting what the speech is likely to be)
• The motor system may modulate neural oscillations which facilitate the segmentation of speech signal

Question 17

how does brain activation differ when listening to voices vs non-voices?

Answer 17

Listening to voices vs. non-vocal sounds elicits increased bilateral neural activity in the temporal cortices

Question 18

Describe the McGurk effect?

Answer 18

depending on what mouth movements you are looking at depends which noise/syllable you are hearing.

Question 19

What does the ventral path way do?

Answer 19

‘what’ pathway

Question 20

What does the dorsal pathway do?

Answer 20

‘how’ pathway