Week 1 Flashcards
What is cognitive psychology?
Cognitive psychology is the branch of psychology dedicated to studying how people think. The cognitive perspective in psychology focuses on how the interactions of thinking, emotion, creativity, and problem-solving abilities affect how and why you think the way you do.
Overall it is more on ‘HOW’ thing works rather than where or why etc..
What is Cognitive Neuro Science?
Cognitive neuroscience is the scientific field that is concerned with the study of the biological processes and aspects that underlie cognition,[1] with a specific focus on the neural connections in the brain which are involved in mental processes. It addresses the questions of how cognitive activities are affected or controlled by neural circuits in the brain.
While traditionally, cognitive psychology has purely been interested in the ‘how’ of information processing, and not the ‘where’, there is now increasing interest in the field of Cognitive neuroscience
What is the meaning of ‘Lexicon’?
Lexicon: The vocabulary of a person, language, or branch of knowledge. Or a dictionary
The meaning of ‘Semantics’?
Semantics: Semantics is the meaning of language. This is important for words because each word has one or more meanings. The meaning of words is called lexical semantics.
What is the ‘Word frequency effect’?
Word frequency effect:
The frequency with which a word appears in a language is called word frequency, and the word frequency effect refers to the fact that we respond more rapidly to high-frequency words like home than to low-frequency words like hike. The reason this is important is because a word’s frequency influences how we process the word.
What is speech?
- It is a sound wave
- ears turn this into a neural signal
- brain translates neural signal to Phonemes
What is the definition of the following
- Phoneme:
- Phonetics:
- Phonology:
Phoneme:
A sound of Language (Units of sounds within a word)
Phonetics:
The acoustic detail of speech sounds and how they are articulated
Phonology:
The study of sound and how they relate to languages
What is the Lack of invariance problem?
Lack of invariance refers to the idea that there is no reliable connection between the language phoneme and its acoustic manifestation in speech. The same word, or even single phoneme, can sound completely differently depending on many factors
A phoneme varies depending on the word we are saying. For example.
e.g., the ‘d’ sound in ‘dim’, ‘daft’, ‘duck’, ‘adder’ are acoustically distinct. Although ‘d’ is the same it varies in sound.
It is said that this varies due the neighbouring sound. In order for phonemes to be identical every time our speech would be spoken in small phoneme units which is unrealistic
- Phonemes take on some of the acoustic properties of their neighbours because the vocal tract anticipates the shape it needs to adopt for the next phoneme
- This is called COARTICULATION
- COARTICULATION enables us to talk at the rate we do.
What is Speaker variability?
- People are different shapes and sizes producing a different sound.
- No two speakers will produce exactly the same sound
- Individuals voices can change overtime due to physical changes
What is the Segmentation Problem ?
When we speak we barely leave spaces between words when in conversation. This is why it can be difficult to pinpoint a few single words when following a conversation in a foreign language.
- Segmenting speech seems effortless – we only become aware of the lack of physical separation between spoken words when you’re listening to someone speaking a foreign language.
Examples of segmentation problems:
Can you hear the difference between the following:
- The stuffy nose can lead to problems.
The stuff he knows can lead to problems. - I scream (for) Ice cream.
This outlines the segmentation problem – especially if English is a foreign language.
Different languages have different sounding words hence different stops and starts of words in which when applied to learning another language can at times produce errors. This is called a Metrical Segmentation Strategy.
What is Categorical perception?
They have done study’s whey various phonemes were announced at different volumes.
At the middle volume it was a 50/50 chance where people thought it was one or the other.
This highlights that we perceive audio as on phoneme that makes sense to us. In other words, we don’t blend them.
Overall, we categorize audio based on our audio perception regardless of what the true sound/phoneme may actually be.
What is Visual cues and speech perception?
Visual cues make it easier for us to predict speech. For example, when in a loud restraint when we can see the persons face we are talking to it makes it much easier for us to perceive the speech correctly.
- This highlights that we don’t just rely on audio to perceive speech, we rely on the context and visual cues etc.
Great example here Called the McGurk effect (McGurk & McDonald, 1976)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtsfidRq2tw
Really highlights how when we multiple sensory systems are working together (Multi modal perception). The brain then translates this in a way that assists us in perceiving the world.
The more our brain does this the more it remembers how to do it again and better
SUMMARY OF WEEK 1 COGNITION Lecture 2 notes: Perceiving Speech
- Humans are exceptionally good at segmenting speech, despite the fact that this is a very difficult task.
- Speech segmentation is challenging because of:
1) Lack of invariance problem.
2) Problem of speaker variability.
3) Segmentation problem
- There is categorical perception of phonemes: we classify speech sounds as one phoneme or another: there is no ‘half-way’ point between two phonemes.
- The context in which we hear a word provides clues about the kinds of words that can be expected. This is evidenced by the phoneme restoration effect, a perceptual effect wherein context leads us to perceive an unheard phoneme.
- McGurk effect demonstrates the influence of visual information on auditory perception: what we hear is influenced by what we see.
