SPHR 1071 Chapter Notes - Chapter 10: Acoustic Phonetics, Vocal Tract, Vocal Folds
8 Jan 2017
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The Human Mind at Work
● Psycholinguistics: the area of linguistics that is concerned with linguistic performance in speech
production and comprehension
● Many psychological processes are involved to break the continuous stream of speech sounds
into phonemes, syllables and words, to pull words from our lexicon, and to assemble the words
into a structural representation
● How do psychological mechanisms work with grammar to form language production and
comprehension?
Comprehension
● Speech sounds can be described in acoustic terms
● Sounds are produced when there's a disturbance in air molecules– If a tree falls and no one's
around, a sound is produced but none is heard
● Acoustic phonetics is concerned only with speech sounds heard by the normal human ear
● Fundamental frequency: how fast the variations of air pressure occur, received as pitch
○ Harmonic- a special frequency that is a multiple of the fundamental frequency
● Intensity: Amplitude of a sound wave determines its loudness
● The quality of a speech sound is determined by the shape of the vocal tract which affects the
strength of harmonics
● Spectrograms or voiceprints are fed speech signals and create an image of words by using its
frequency components
○ Time (X), Frequency (Y)
○ Formants: Dark bands that indicate vowels and differ in their placement
■ Formants represent the strongest harmonics/ sub-waves produced by the vocal
tract's shape
● Striations: thin vertical lines indicating a opening/ closing of the vocal cords. The closer the are
the higher the frequency and therefore pitch
● Segmentation Problem: the question of how listeners separate a speech signal into meaningful
units
● Lack of invariance Problem: the question of how a listener knows that 2 physically distinct
instances of a sound are the same
○ Normalization procedures– Listeners calibrate their perceptions and quickly adapt to
accents and distorted speech as well as timing differences
● Categorical perception: speakers perceive physically distinct stimuli as belonging to the same
category because their perceptions are affected by knowing the classifying system below it. (ex.
Sounds are ascribed to phonemes based on the phonology of the language)
○ Developed in the first year of life
○ Intonation aids in differentiating meanings and
● Lexical access: Word recognition; using lexical knowledge to identify words in a signal
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
● Successful language comprehension depends on parallel processing of many components:
● Perception and comprehension must involve:
○ Top-down processing (Higher-level semantic , syntactic, and contextual info to analyze
the acoustic signal)
■ Subjects make more errors repeating muffled words in isolation than in a
sentence
■ Phoneme restoration- when a noise interrupts a word, it is difficult to
remember where
○ Bottom-Up processing (Acoustic info > phonemes > morphemes > words > phrases >
interpretation)
● Word separation depends both on how the word is said and the context its in
● Lexical decision: A task of subjects who on presentation of a spoken or printed stimulus must
decide whether it is a word or not
○ Measured in processing by response time (RT)
● Psycholinguists say a "resting level of activation" increases each time the listener accesses the
word, faster RTs to more common words
● Semantic Priming: Words are more quickly recognized if primed with a semantically similar word
(ex. Doctor, nurse)
○ Morphological Priming: when a morpheme of a multi-morphemic word primes a related
word (ex. Sheepdog, wool)
● Phonologically related words "phonological neighborhoods" affects lexical retrieval
● Parsing: the mental process in which one determines the syntactic relations among words and
phrases, largely governed by grammar and sequence
● In words that act as more than one part of speech, the brain recognizes both meanings and
categories before choosing one
● Garden path sentence: sentence that induces "backtracking"- interpreting a word as one part of
speech before realizing it is not
● 2 general principles used by the mental parser to deal with syntactic ambiguity
○ Minimal attachment-build the simplest structure consistent with the grammar of the
language
○ Late closure- attach incoming material to the phrase that is currently being processed
● Memory constraints also may play a role in parsing- more difficult in longer sentences
● Shadowing task: subjects are asked to repeat what they hear as quickly as possible
○ Fast shadowers often correct errors in speech automatically
Speech Production
● More commonly make speech errors/ slip-of-the-tongue with words that are semantically
related
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
Psycholinguistics: the area of linguistics that is concerned with linguistic performance in speech production and comprehension. Many psychological processes are involved to break the continuous stream of speech sounds into phonemes, syllables and words, to pull words from our lexicon, and to assemble the words into a structural representation. Speech sounds can be described in acoustic terms. Sounds are produced when there"s a disturbance in air molecules if a tree falls and no one"s around, a sound is produced but none is heard. Acoustic phonetics is concerned only with speech sounds heard by the normal human ear. Fundamental frequency: how fast the variations of air pressure occur, received as pitch. Harmonic- a special frequency that is a multiple of the fundamental frequency. Intensity: amplitude of a sound wave determines its loudness. The quality of a speech sound is determined by the shape of the vocal tract which affects the strength of harmonics.
