Lesson 12: Language Phonemes → Words→Sentences Flashcards
Human Language
- Creative: Hierarchical + governed by rules
- Universally used for Communication: use and development similar across culture
-Behaviorists: language learned by being rewarded - Chomsky: language never heard or rewarded for
Language of Processing
Syntax: grammar rules
Semantics: meaning
Phoneme
Sounds of speech: Smallest unit of sound that can signal meaning
- 45 phonemes
- phonemes changing can change words
Acoustic Signal (sounds coming out)
Patterns in the pressure change produced by the position and/or movement of the articulators (vocal tract changes as we make diff sounds)
Producing Phonemes
Vocal tract contracts in different ways, and different frequencies at different dBs are produced. Waveforms make of the sounds of speech that we perceive, phonemes
Sound Spectrogram
Consonants show formant transitions (rapid changes in frequency before or after they are produced)
- Vowels: see diff dark band (formats)
Perceptual Constancy for Phonemes
They sound the same even with different acoustic signals
Categorical Perception
- Voice Onset Time: time delay between when a sound starts and when voicing begins (if you cut off the beginning of ta it may sound like da)
The Phonetic Boundary
Where a range of VOTs was perceived as /ta/
- use a range to perceive phonemes
Bottom-Up vs. Top-Down
Without any top-down contributions, we would be very bad at perceiving speech
Vision
Speech perception is multimodal - it can be influenced by vision (vision of lips contribute to what we hear)
Word Superiority Effect
Written Letters easier to recognize when they occur within a real word
Perceiving Phoneme
Faster Recognition for phoneme if it’s part of a word in both
Morphemes
Smallest unit that has its own meaning (word is a morpheme but not vice versa)
- “s”
- “ed”
- “er”
- “the”
- “show”
Mental Lexicon
The brain dictionary of all the words we know
- physical form
- semantic information
- syntactic information
- lexicon must be arranged very efficiently
