Acoustics Final

Front 1

assimilation

Back 1

- speech sound in question is actually changed in order to be more like its neighbors
- a feature of one sound is extended to another

Hint 1

- e.g. voicing feature extended to /s/ in "husband" due to influence of voiced surroundings

Front 2

types of assimilation

Back 2

- anticipatory
- carry-over

Front 3

coarticulation

Back 3

- when two articulators are moving at the same time for the production of different phonemes (makes speech more efficient)

Hint 3

e.g. /tu/ can be produced in such a way that the lips are rounding for /u/ during the production of /t/

Front 4

studies of coarticulation

Back 4

- proposed by Ohman
- speech is vowel driven with consonant superimposed into the vowel
- postulated that tongue acts almost as 3 separate articulators (tip, blade, and body) and can co-articulate with itself

Front 5

parallel processing

Back 5

- part of both speech production and perception
- co-articulation and assimilation together makes speech transmission rapid and efficient as a code
- speech is not a single stream of phonemes
- phonemes overlap and are modified by suprasegmentals

Front 6

suprasegmental/prosodic features of a language

Back 6

- general names for rhythmic and tonal features of speech that carry meaning
- features can be overlaid onto a phoneme, syllable, word, phrase, or sentence

Front 7

stress

Back 7

- signaled by increased muscular effort, intensity, duration and fundamental frequency
- can be shifted for emphasis
- can be used to change meaning

Front 8

isochrony

Back 8

- alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables
- stressed syllables occur at fairly regular intervals

Front 9

intonation

Back 9

- perceived changes in fundamental frequency which can be imposed onto a syllable, word, phrase or sentence

Front 10

purpose of intonation

Back 10

- mark syntactic context
- change in semantics
- signal attitudes and feelings

Front 11

duration

Back 11

speech sound vary in intrinsic duration:
- diphthongs and long vowels longer than short, unstressed vowels
- continuous consonants (fricatives, nasals, liquids) longer than stops
- vowels longer before voiced consonants than before voiceless ones

Front 12

juncture

Back 12

- the way phonemes or words are "joined to" or "separated from" each other, resulting in a change in meaning
(e.g. an aim vs. a name)

Front 13

perceptual units

Back 13

perceived segments in the acoustic sound stream

Hint 13

e.g phonemes, syllables, words, whole phrases, sentences and entire concepts

Front 14

passive theories of speech perception

Back 14

listener does nothing but let filtering mechanism process incoming information

Front 15

active theories of speech perception

Back 15

listener plays active role in perception and identification

Hint 15

when listener has speech, they have knowledge of how to produce speech, and this knowledge allows them to identify what is being said

Front 16

bottom up theories of speech perception

Back 16

acoustic cues alone are enough for the listener to understand what is being said

Front 17

top-down theories of speech

Back 17

listener must rely on higher level sources of information (speaker, context, sentences, words) to understand what is said

Front 18

motor theory

Back 18

- knowledge of motor requirements for articulation is required for the perception and identification of speech
- originally based on the fact that listener is also a speaker

Front 19

underlying assumption of motor theory

Back 19

speech stimuli are perceived by means of processes also involved in their production

Front 20

logogen theory

Back 20

- idea that logogens contain all information about a given word
- logogens monitor speech production to detect information indicating that specific word is present in speech signal
- if detected, logogen is activated, and if sufficiently activated, it crosses a threshold of recognition

Front 21

logogens

Back 21

- passive sensing neural devices associated with each word in the mental lexicon
- form of filtering mechanism

Front 22

perceptual constancy/invariance

Back 22

- listeners are able to accurately perceive speech from different speakers, despite variability
- unknown whether there are processes responsible for this perceptual compensation

Front 23

perception of speech

Back 23

- very complicated, multi-faceted process
- not fully understood

Front 24

formants

Back 24

- resonances of human vocal tract
- important for identifying vowels
- first 2 or 3 formants usually sufficient to identify and differentiate between vowels

Front 25

diphthongs

Back 25

- combination of two vowels
- exhibit formant transitions

Front 26

formant transitions

Back 26

- frequency changes in a portion of formants
- cues for identifying diphthongs
- reflect changes in the shape of the vocal tract via articulator movements

Front 27

perception of consonants

Back 27

- more complex than vowels perception because they depend on vowels for their recognition
- e.g. voice onset time

Front 28

smallest unit of perceptual analysis

Back 28

unknown

Front 29

acoustic-phonetic invariance principle

Back 29

- there is a distinct set of acoustic features corresponding to each phoneme
- each time a phoneme is produced, the same acoustic cues are identifiable in the speech signal, regardless of context

Front 30

linearity principle

Back 30

- in a spoken word, a specific sound corresponds to each phoneme
- specific sounds are discrete and ordered in a particular sequence

Front 31

segmentation principle

Back 31

- states that speech signal can be divided and recombined into acoustically independent units that correspond to specific phonemes

Front 32

three issues of the primary recognition problem

Back 32

- acoustic-phonetic invariance principle
- linearity principle
- segmentation principle

Front 33

anticipatory assimilation

Back 33

- influence is in anticipation of the next sound (often a result in placement)

Hint 33

e.g. /n/ is changed to /ng/ in "think" in anticipation of the /k/

Front 34

carry-over assimilation

Back 34

- an ongoing feature is continued to the next sound (often a result of voicing)

Hint 34

e.g. /s/ is changed to /z/ in "dogs" because the /g/ is voiced, but remains /s/ in "cats" because the /t/ is voiceless

Front 35

types of suprasegmentals

Back 35

- stress
- intonation
- duration
- juncture