LING 210 Lecture Notes - Lecture 14: Lexicon, Speech Segmentation, Prior Probability
24 Dec 2018
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Document Summary
Two lectures ago, we talked about cues for speech segmentation, which help to identify words. When trying to identify words, listeners make use of both bottom up and top down information. Bottom up information is information that comes from the signal: if you hear [b ], you will conclude that the word might be ball " and will conclude that it"s probably not. But these types of inferences are made probabilistically: if the sound continues with. [izbi], you might then think it"s frisbee after all, and that you misheard the first sound. Top-down information is any information you bring to bear on interpreting the acoustic stream that comes from prior knowledge, and is not based on the signal. If you hear [b ] and happen to be on a soccer field, you might guess that"s likely going to be ball ; if you happen to be on a cattle farm, you might think you"re hearing bull .
