weeks 8.2 to 10.2

Question 1

language-specific phonology

Answer 1

features (e.g., voicing, aspiration) that can contrast meanings

Question 2

categorical perception

Answer 2

we tend to perceive “categories” in language; can vary with one’s language background; members/exemplars with subtle differences within the category likely to be perceived as the same; often tested on a continuum of synthesized stimuli; can be language-specific

Question 3

the typical way of designing a categorical perception experiment (3)

Answer 3

(1) identify two sounds that differ in an acoustic feature and that native listeners can discriminate; (2) create a continuum that starts from one sound to another by varying the key acoustic feature, can consist of 20 or more stimuli/”steps”; (3) ask participants to identify each stimulus along the continuum

Question 4

“indexical properties of speech”

Answer 4

speaker-related characteristics; the feature of the sounds you use to identify the speakers

Question 5

McGurk effect

Answer 5

mismatch between auditory and visual information, which change the sound you hear

Question 6

motor theory of speech perception

Answer 6

perceive the intended articulatory gestures; evaluate the gestures needed for the sounds perceived

Question 7

AX discrimination vs ABX categorization task

Answer 7

AX: determine if two sounds/syllables/nonwords are the same
ABX: determine if the third stimulus (X) is more similar to the first (A) or second (B)

Question 8

gating task

Answer 8

a paradigm for studying spoken word recognition; words presented segment by segment incrementally (each gate = current + previous segment)

Question 9

isolation point of recognition (IP) (gating task)

Answer 9

the point (in ms) when a word is recognized

Question 10

cohort

Answer 10

a collection of possible words to be activated/selected; serial processing of speech; this model can be tested using a gating paradigm

Question 11

implications of Grosjean (1980) (3)

Answer 11

high frequency words recognized faster than low-frequency ones; semantic context helps word recognition; serial processing of speech sounds

Question 12

possible recognition processes (routes in VWR) (3)

Answer 12

(1) visual input –> orthography –> phonology –> semantics (e.g. form-based; Chinese characters)
(2) visual input –> phonology –> orthography –> semantics (e.g. sound-based; English)
(3) visual input –> orthography –> semantics –> (phonology)

Question 13

alphabetic vs. logographic writing systems

Answer 13

alphabetic: more transparent mapping/correspondence from form to sound
logographic: more transparent mapping/correspondence from form to meaning

Question 14

grapheme

Answer 14

a letter, letter strings, characteristics, etc.

Question 15

consistent vs. inconsistent GPC (“grapheme-phoneme correspondence”)

Answer 15

consistent: (nearly) one-to-one mapping, shallow orthography (one grapheme to one sound)
inconsistent: one-to-many mapping, deep orthography (one grapheme to many sounds)

Question 16

stimulus-onset-asynchrony (SOA)

Answer 16

the interval from the beginning of the prime to the beginning of a target

Question 17

semantic categorization task (3 steps)

Answer 17

category label –> stimulus –> response

Question 18

false positive

Answer 18

answered “yes” to the category question when the correct answer is “no”

Question 19

connectionist model

Answer 19

letter, feature, word, language all represented as nodes; feature to letter inhibition; letter to word inhibition, language-specific letter sequencing inhibits incorrect vocabulary; interactive (both top-down and bottom-up)

Question 20

visual word form area (VWFA)

Answer 20

left fusiform gyrus/lateral occipitotemporal sulcus

Question 21

surface vs. phonological vs. deep dyslexia

Answer 21

surface: difficulty in decoding inconsistent grapheme-phoneme correspondence (GPC)
phonological: deficit in form –> sound
deep: (semantic paralexia) read word A as B (related in meaning)

Question 22

n-gram frequency

Answer 22

the frequency of occurrences of any X words in a sentence

Question 23

structural priming

Answer 23

reading/comprehension of one sentence influenced by another sentence similar or dissimilar in structure

Question 24

recursion

Answer 24

add X number of phrases/clauses to an existing one (temp. definition); embed A into B, and then B into a (like a loop)

Question 25

parts of speech

Answer 25

categorization of words by syntactic functions