Chapter 11- Sensation and Perception – Flashcards
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Why is speech important?
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- humans are capable of producing many different speech sounds - about 5000 languages are spoken today (850 different speech sounds
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vocal tract
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- the airway above the larynx used for production of speech - includes the oral tract/nasal tract - flexible
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3 basic components of Speech Production
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1.) Respiration (lungs) 2.) Phonation (vocal cords/folds) 3.) Articulation (vocal tract)
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Phonation
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process through which vocal folds are made to vibrate when air pushes out the lungs
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Respiration and Phonation
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initiating speech - diaphragm pushes air out of lungs, through trachea, up to larynx - At larynx--> air must pass through 2 vocal folds
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children vs. adult men
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children: small vocal folds, high-pitched voices adult men: larger mass of vocal folds, low-pitched voices
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Articulation
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the act or manner of producing a speech sound using the vocal tract - vocal tract = can change shape by manipulating jaw, lip, tongue body/tip, velum (soft palate) - this manipulation is articulation
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Classifying speech sounds
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- most often described in terms of articulation - Place/Manner/Voicing - some sounds are common across languages, and others aren't (English "th" and "r" are uncommon)
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Place of articulation
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at lips = b, p, m alveolar ridge = d, t, n soft palate = g, k, ng
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Manner of articulation
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totally obstructed = b, d, g, p, t, k partially obstructed = s, z, f, v, th, sh only slightly obstructed = l, r, w, y first blocked, then open = ch, j blocked at mouth but allowed to go through nasal passage = n, m, ng
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Voicing of articulation
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whether the vocal cords are vibrating or not - vibrating = b, m, z, l, r - not vibrating = p, s, ch
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speech production
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is very fast - 10-15 consonants and vowels per second
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coarticulation
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lots of sounds in a row, and they tend to overlap - experienced talkers position tongue in anticipation of next consonant or vowel (causing coarticulation)
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speech perception for computer programs
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coarticulation presents a major challenge - recognize the d sound in deem, doom, dam as same when it is different because of coarticulation - computers have to process all possibilities - increased processing power improves speech recognition greatly (SIRI)
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how do humans recognize sounds despite coarticulation?
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categorical perception
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categorical perceptions
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- researchers can manipulate sound stimuli to vary continuously from "bah" to "dah" to "gah" - people do not perceive the sounds as continuously varying - people perceive sharp categorical boundaries between the stimuli (categorical perceptions)
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using multiple acoustic cues
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- perception depends on experience - similar to face recognition = similar features can be used in different combinations, and we rely on multiple cues to recognize a face
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learning to listen
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Babies = learn even before they are born - prenatal experience: newborns prefer hearing their mother's voice over other women's voices - 4 day old French babies prefer hearing French over Russian - newborns prefer hearing children's stories that were read aloud by their mothers during their third trimester of pregnancy
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Native listeners
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- sound distinctions are specific to various languages EX: Japanese - "r" and "l" are not distinguished - infants begin filtering out irrelevant acoustics long before they start to say speech sounds
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learning words: how do we know where one word ends and another begins?
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Research by Saffran, Aslin, and Newport (1996) - created a novel language and infants listened to sentences for 2 minutes - afterwards, infants could already distinguish between words and non-words in the novel language
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statistical learning
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certain sounds (making words) are more likely to occur together and babies are sensitive to those probabilities
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speech in the brain
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- brain damage follows patterns of blood vessels, not brain function so it is difficult to study - PET/fMRI studies help us learn about speech processing in the brain
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brain: listening to speech
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- left and right superior temporal lobes are activated more strongly in response to speech than to non-speech sounds - hard to create well-controlled non-speech stimuli because humans are so good at understanding even severely distorted speech
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brain: categorical perception tasks
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- listeners attempt to discriminate sounds like "bah" and "dah" while having their brain scanned
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brain: anterior and ventral regions of superior temporal
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process complex sounds - research indicates that some speech areas become active when lip-reading
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brain tests
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- sometimes electrical recordings are taken directly from human brains prior to surgery - electrodes are implanted in cortex to determine the function of certain areas before surgery
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neural responses in the brain....
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- matched behavioral responses by the subjects - sounds that people labeled as the same had the same neural responses - sounds that people labeled as different had different neural responses
