Language II: Speech Perception & Production

Practice flashcards covering definitions and theories from the lecture on speech perception and production.

Phonemes

Elementary (smallest) units of sound in language; for example, ‘rice’ and ‘lice’ differ by just one phoneme.

Morphemes

Elementary (smallest) units of meaning in language; for example, dog-s.

Phonology

The rules governing the sound of words and parts of words.

Syntax

The rules governing word order and meaning resulting in sentences, such as ‘pass the salt’ versus ‘the pass salt’.

Semantics

The meanings associated with words and sentences.

Pragmatics

The use of language as a function of content and social rules, determining the choice between terms like ‘hello’, ‘hi’, or ‘hey’.

Segmentation

The process of separating phonemes and words from the continuous pattern of speech sounds.

Co-articulation

When the pronunciation of a phoneme by a speaker depends on the preceding and following phonemes.

Motor Theory (Liberman et al., $1967$)

A theory suggesting that listeners perceive spoken words by reproducing the movements of the speaker’s vocal tract rather than by identifying generated sound patterns.

McGurk Effect

An effect occurring when the auditory component of one sound pairs with the visual component of another sound, leading to the perception of a third sound.

Categorical Speech Perception

Observations by Raizada and Poldrack ($2007$) that speakers do not perceive gradual change but suddenly switch from perceiving one sound to another across a crucial point.

TRACE (McClelland & Elman, $1986$)

A neural network model including nodes that process information about specific aspects of speech at $3$ levels: auditory feature, phoneme, and word.

Auditory Feature Nodes

Processing units in the TRACE model that handle auditory features of speech, such as pitch.

Phonemic Restoration Effect

Demonstrated by Warren & Warren ($1970$), it occurs when listeners ‘hear’ a missing phoneme based on the context of the sentence.

Ganong Effect

Also known as lexical identification shift, which occurs when phonemes are assigned to words rather than non-words during speech perception (Ganong, $1980$).

Preformulation

A method to make speech production easier by producing phrases that have been used before.

Underspecification

A strategy to ease speech production by using simplified expressions, such as saying ‘something’ instead of a proper name.

Conceptualisation

The first stage of the speech production process which involves thinking of an idea to communicate.

Formulation

The second stage of the speech production process which involves finding a way to express an idea with specific language tools.

Articulation

The final stage of the speech production process which involves physically moving muscles to produce speech.

WEAVER++

A speech production model proposed by Levelt et al. ($1999$) that utilizes feed-forward, serial processing.

Lemma

The intermediate stage in the speech production process between activating an idea and producing the speech sound.

Spreading Activation (Dell, $1986$)

An interactive processing model where nodes corresponding to words or concepts vary in activation and spread it to related nodes.

Tip-of-the-Tongue State (TOTS)

A state where a speaker has a concept in mind but cannot find the appropriate word, typically occurring with low-frequency words.

Semantic Substitution

A speech error where a word is replaced by another with a related meaning, such as saying ‘tennis bat’ instead of ‘tennis racquet’.

Word-exchange

An utterance error where two words are swapped, such as ‘My chair looks empty without my room’.

Spoonerisms

Sound exchange speech errors where sounds are swapped between words, such as ‘Go and shake a tower’ for ‘Go and take a shower’.

Lexical Bias Effect

The phenomenon where speech errors tend to feature real words rather than non-words.

Mixed-error Effect

A speech error where the incorrect word is both semantically and phonemically related to the target word, such as saying ‘let’s start’ when the target is ‘let’s stop’.

Audience Design

The process of making communication effective by accounting for the specific needs and communication levels of the listener.