Psychology 2134A/B Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Speech Perception, Categorical Perception, The Motor

• School: Western University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: Psychology 2134A/B
• Professor: Marc Joanisse

Document Summary

Perceiving auditory speech: physics of sounds, spectrograms, acoustic cues of speech. Humans are very good at recognizing speech: we can understand all speakers of our language, even people we"ve never heard before. Computers are very bad at it: at best, can recognize very general speech, or the speech of one person, even though computers are pretty good at other tasks. What makes speech so different: transmit through sound waves. Sound travels as waves: vibration of air molecules. These waves have several important properties: for example, pitch and volume, amplitude = how loud something is, frequency = how often over time you reach from one peak to another for each sound. Frequency is measured in hz (cycles per second) Changing the amplitude of a sound wave changes its volume. Cochlea: organ of auditory sensation (inner ear, hair cells are sensitive and stimulated to excessive types of frequencies, organized tonotopically. Basilar membrane: extends inside cochlea, undulated in vibrating fluid of cochlea.