PSYC513/703: Language and Communication - Spoken Word Recognition

Vocabulary flashcards for the Language and Communication Lecture 2: Spoken Word Recognition

Speech Variability

Variations in acoustic waveforms due to speaker rate, intonation, noise, distortion, and accent.

Phone

A basic unit of sound in speech; a speech segment with distinct physical or perceptual properties.

Acoustic Phonetics

The study of the physical properties of speech sounds (waveforms).

Articulatory Phonetics

The study of how speech sounds are produced by the articulators.

Allophones

Different phones that are perceptually equivalent in a language.

Phoneme

A set of phones that are cognitively equivalent; the basic unit that distinguishes words.

Minimal Pairs

Pairs of words that differ in only one phoneme (e.g., /p/ and /b/ in 'pin' and 'bin').

Ganong Effect

The effect where a phone is perceived as one or another phoneme depending upon context.

Voice Onset Time

The time delay between the release of a stop consonant and the start of vocal cord vibration.

Phoneme Restoration Effect

The phenomenon where missing phonemes are perceptually restored in context.

McGurk Effect

A multimodal speech perception effect where visual input (lip movements) influences the perceived auditory phoneme.

Continuous Speech Signal

The continuous movement of articulators results in this, with boundaries not evident in the speech.

Segmentation

The process of dividing a continuous speech stream into distinct words.

Cross-Modal Priming

A task used to investigate word segmentation where participants hear sentences and respond to written words.

Lexical Access

Matching a string of letters/phonemes/syllables to a word in the lexicon.

Cohort Model

A model of word recognition that proposes a set of lexical items are activated based on the initial portion of the spoken input (Marslen-Wilson & Welsh, 1978).

Access Stage

The stage in the cohort model where perceptual representation is used to activate lexical items, thus generating a candidate set of items.

Selection Stage

The stage in the cohort model where the most likely candidate is chosen from the cohort.

Integration Stage

The stage in the cohort model where the semantic and syntactic properties of the chosen words are utilized.

Isolation Point (in Gating)

The point at which a person guesses the whole word when presented with gradually increasing fragments of the word.

Lexical Decision Task

Pressing a button when a presented stimulus is a real word.

Uniqueness Point

How early in the word does it become unique relative to other words.

High Frequency Words

Common words.

Low Frequency Words

Uncommon words.

Neighborhood

Words that sound alike.

TRACE Model

An interactive activation model with feature, phoneme, and word detectors.

Inhibitory Connections

Evidence that a certain stretch of the input is the word, so it is NOT any other word.

Excitatory Connections

Evidence that a certain stretch of the input is the sound, so it might be the beginning of a word.