3 - Speech Perception

Question 1

Frequency

Answer 1

Number of wavelengths pass by point in time. Measured in Hz

Heard as pitch

Question 2

Amplitude

Answer 2

Amount of change wave undergoes in one cycle

Heard as loudness

Question 3

Fundamental frequency

Answer 3

Lowest frequency produced by a vibrating object
Half length, third length make overtones
Combination heard as timbre

Question 4

Cochlea

Answer 4

Has basilar membrane covered with hair cells

Tonotopic organization from 20k - 20 Hz

Question 5

Primary auditory cortex

Answer 5

Known as A1, superior temporal lobe that does initial processing of the input from the cochlea

Question 6

Spectrogram

Answer 6

Chart displaying the pattern of frequencies in the speech stream and how those patterns change over time

Question 7

Prosody

Answer 7

Fluctuations in the fundamental frequency during an utterance

Question 8

Formant

Answer 8

Bands of high amplitude sound at certain frequencies above the fundamental frequency

Question 9

Sonorant

Answer 9

Serves as a consonant but sometimes a vowel (m, l, etc)

Question 10

Formant transition

Answer 10

Modification of a formant due to proceeding or following consonant provides cues for distinguishing consonants
Formant transition is chirp

Question 11

Fricative

Answer 11

Consonant produced by constricting the air stream to create friction (f, sh, s)

Question 12

Plosives

Answer 12

Consonant that momentarily blocks then releases the airstream (b and p, d and t, g and k)

Question 13

Aspiration

Answer 13

Puff of air accompanying plosives

Question 14

Voice onset time

Answer 14

Time between release of plosives consonant and beginning of vocal fold vibration
Distinguishes between bah and pah

Question 15

Phonemic restoration

Answer 15

Filling in missing segments of the speech stream with contextually appropriate material

Question 16

McGurk effect

Answer 16

Artificially induced illusion in which auditory information for a speech sound is combined with visual info for a second, combination makes a third

Question 17

Prosodic bootstrapping hypothesis

Answer 17

Infants use intonation and stress patterns to infer phrase and word boundaries

Question 18

Metrical segmentation strategy

Answer 18

Segmenting speech stream by assuming English words begin on a stressed syllable

Question 19

Motor theory

Answer 19

People perceive speech by inferring the movements of the vocal tract that produced those sounds

Question 20

Direct realism

Answer 20

New form of motor theory, have direct awareness of the world because the density input is sufficiently rich for us to completely recover the object of perception