Psychology 2134A/B Lecture : Speech Perception

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

Document Summary

Overview y perceiving auditory speech: physics of sounds, pectrograms y acoustic cues of speech y recognizing auditory words, models, theories. We can understand all the speakers of our language, even people we"ve never heard before. We do this in a way that is quite effortless and on-line; that is, rapidly and without overtly controlling how quickly the speaker is producing speech. What is interesting is that scientists have had a hard time programming computers to do the same task. Even with very fast computers and over 60 years of engineering we still don"t have computers that can understand natural speech in the same way humans do. Instead computer speech systems are only good at recognizing a few words at a time and are poor at compensating for different accents and noisy environments. To answer this we must first explore how sound works. We can describe sounds as vibration traveling through the air.