LING 210 Lecture Notes - Lecture 10: Shepard Tone, Formant, Speech Perception
24 Dec 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
Our percept of the sound that reaches our ear is not an accurate representation of the physical signal. It is an interpretation of that signal, sometimes called analysis of an auditory scene. Sound illusions are effective illustrations that the acoustic signal is not always line up with our perception. The brain decodes the speech message in the acoustic signal by computing a representation based on particular cues. One example of such a cue voice onset time (vot), which we discussed last week. The representation that we extract from the acoustic stream is more abstract than the actual signal this allows us to recognize a word even if it doesn"t quite sound the same as any previous occurrance we heard. This is crucial, since actually no two occurrences sound exactly alike (even a recording will sound very different if played in a different room, for example).
