SpeechScienceXIII.pptVIP

Speech Science XIII Speech perception is special (Accompanying notes in English) Topics Speech perception as simple pattern matching? Evidence for and against a “speech mode” of speech perception. A bird’s-eye view of the perception landscape Reading: BHR(3rd ed.), chapter 6 (part 2), pp. 203-229 (5th ed.), chap. 11, pp. 237-272 P.-M., 3.2.2., part 2 + 3.2.3. pp. 162-173 Speech perception as pattern matching The “acoustic cue” concept suggests acoustic patterns which can be stored in memory (learned) But huge variability in the acoustic structure of any linguistic unit (sound, syllable or word) argues against a simple pattern-matching mechanism. The issue of how much of the variability is stored and used when perceiving speech divides scientists. The brain is very powerful, but how is the power used! Most agree that we don’t just (passively) receive input, but that we actively work with it to create our percepts. But how? – We look first at vowels How do we deal with vowels? Vowel formants vary greatly with the size of the vocal tract. But formants change in relation to one another, and they change together with other properties, (e.g. F0: children – adults; women – men) The relative values of formants have therefore been examined. We do change our interpretation of formant values a) as a function of (very) different F0 valuesb) as a function of preceding formant values. And – our two-formant model of vowels is not reality Two or more formants? F0 as a factor in perceived vowel quality? Vowels relative to preceding context. Immediate vs. wider context The carrier phrase influence shows effects of wider context. The F0 effect is vowel-intrinsic, but average F0 over a phrase also provides a wider F0 context. So one important question is, whether we simply change the frame within which we process vowel formants according to the information about the speaker that we collect during the utterance? This would mean that vowels would be more dif