Speech Perception Quiz

Speech Perception

• Language-specific phonology (inventory) that has voicing, aspiration; every phoneme can form a category by itself, and actualization is the exemplar.
• Contrastive sound units produce words.
• Dialects can vary, resulting in many variations in phonemic inventory.
• Sound categories differentiate different words to produce minimal pairs.
• Native sound categories are formed gradually in infancy through continuous exposure to input (from caregivers).
• Sounds from a native language can present challenges when learning a second language.
• Japanese speakers' perception of English /r/ and /l/ phonemes is influenced by their language, as these sounds are not contrastive in Japanese.
• Categorical perception involves categorizing an auditory signal (audio stimulus).
• We categorize sounds that are similar to a prototype as belonging to a category.
• Categories can change with language background.
• A categorical perception experiment typically involves a continuum of stimuli, varying a key acoustic feature (like VOT).
• Listeners categorize the sounds continuously.
• Response time is slower for stimuli that are slightly different but within the category compared to stimuli exactly on the boundary.
• Listeners are sensitive to small differences even if they are categorized the same.

Categorical Perception of Voice Onset Time (VOT)

• VOT is a key acoustic feature used to distinguish /ba/ from /pa/.
• Participants categorize sounds along a continuum.
• The decision time is based on category membership.
• Decision time is longer at the category boundary.
• Listeners are able to detect subtle differences within categories.

Impact of Masks on Perception of Speech

• Masks impacts perception because lip movements don't match the sounds they hear.

Motor Theory of Speech Perception

• Speech perception involves perceiving gestures from motor cortex.
• Perception of speech involves articulatory gestures, like mouth and tongue movements.
• Motor cortex activation occurs during perception.
• Perception of speech sounds involves mimicking the sounds in the mind.

Written Form (Orthography)

• Not all writing systems represent speech sounds similarly.
• Some writing systems are more consistent than others.
• Mental representations of written forms are active after literacy training.
• Degraded auditory signals can be challenging when learning new languages, because written forms can sometimes differ from spoken versions.
• Silent letters influence perception of speech.

Phoneme Awareness

• Phoneme awareness requires knowledge of phonemes.
• Phoneme awareness improves with literacy training.

Possible Paradigms for Low-Level Processing

• Phoneme (or rhyme) monitoring task.
• Identification tasks (identify heard syllables or nonwords.)
• Sound-splicing studies (examining how sound transitions affect lexical decisions).
• AX discrimination tasks (determining if two sounds or nonwords are the same or different).
• Lexical decision tasks (determining whether a presented stimulus is a word or not).
• Word spotting task (visual or auditory, identifying words in a sequence).

Language Background and Word Recognition

• Language background (number of languages spoken) influences word recognition speed.
• Increased competition in language areas can slow down word recognition.

Context Effect

• Longer context allows for easier and faster recognition.
• The frequency of a word affects context.
• Higher-frequency words are recognized faster than low-frequency words.

Visual Word Recognition

• Visual word recognition has several models with distinct layers for features, letters, and words.
• Models vary across orthographies.
• Processing is language-dependent.
• Reading skills directly relate to activation in visual areas.

Dyslexia and Visual Word Recognition

• Surface dyslexia and phonological dyslexia are specific deficits in reading and decoding words.
• Deep dyslexia involves semantic paraphasia, which can involve reading words with semantically related but incorrect meanings.
• Different types of dyslexia differ in activation patterns in the brain.

Syntactic Processing

• Syntax focuses on how words are structured in sentences, to create grammatical sentences and follow rules.
• Ambiguous sentences (sentences that can have more than one interpretation) are parsed differently by the brain.
• Different types of activation patterns in the brain are related to different syntactic structures.

Chinese Letter Recognition

• Readers of Chinese languages appear more reliant on visual/orthographic processing in recognizing the characters.
• Activation of orthographic info occurs first, then phonological information, and lastly semantic processing.

This quiz explores the intricacies of speech perception, focusing on how language-specific phonology and sound categories influence comprehension and production. It highlights the role of dialects, native sound categories, and their impact on second language learning, particularly in relation to phonemes like /r/ and /l/. Test your knowledge on these concepts and their implications in linguistics.