Speech Perception
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Categorical Perception of Natural and Unnatural Categories: Evidence for Innate Category Boundaries1
UCLA Working Papers in Linguistics, vol.13, December 2005 Papers in Psycholinguistics 2, Okabe & Nielsen (eds.) CATEGORICAL PERCEPTION OF NATURAL AND UNNATURAL CATEGORIES: EVIDENCE FOR INNATE CATEGORY BOUNDARIES1 JILL GILKERSON [email protected] The results reported here support the claim that naturally occurring phonemic contrasts are easier to acquire than unnatural contrasts. Results are reported from two experiments in which English speakers were exposed to non-native phonemic categories using a bi-modal statistical frequency distribution modeled after Maye and Gerken (2000). Half of the participants heard a distribution in which the category boundary was that of the Jordanian Arabic uvular/pharyngeal contrast, while the other half heard a distribution with an unnatural category boundary. Immediately after exposure, participants completed an A-X delayed comparison task, where they were presented with stimuli that crossed category boundaries. Results indicated that participants in the natural training group responded “different” to across-category pairs significantly more often than participants in the unnatural training group. 1. INTRODUCTION The purpose of this research is to investigate whether adult acquisition of non-native phonemic contrasts is solely dependent on general learning principles or whether it is influenced by principles specific to natural language. Theories of innate grammar claim that humans are endowed with a genetically predetermined system specifically designed to facilitate language acquisition (cf. Chomsky 1965, among others). Nativists maintain that humans are “prewired” with sensitivity to linguistically relevant information in the input. Others have suggested that there are no learning mechanisms specific to language acquisition; it is facilitated by an interaction between statistical distribution of elements in the input and general learning mechanisms not specific to language (cf. -
Neural Correlates of Audiovisual Speech Perception in Aphasia and Healthy Aging
The Texas Medical Center Library DigitalCommons@TMC The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center UTHealth Graduate School of The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Biomedical Sciences Dissertations and Theses Center UTHealth Graduate School of (Open Access) Biomedical Sciences 12-2013 NEURAL CORRELATES OF AUDIOVISUAL SPEECH PERCEPTION IN APHASIA AND HEALTHY AGING Sarah H. Baum Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.library.tmc.edu/utgsbs_dissertations Part of the Behavioral Neurobiology Commons, Medicine and Health Sciences Commons, and the Systems Neuroscience Commons Recommended Citation Baum, Sarah H., "NEURAL CORRELATES OF AUDIOVISUAL SPEECH PERCEPTION IN APHASIA AND HEALTHY AGING" (2013). The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center UTHealth Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences Dissertations and Theses (Open Access). 420. https://digitalcommons.library.tmc.edu/utgsbs_dissertations/420 This Dissertation (PhD) is brought to you for free and open access by the The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center UTHealth Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences at DigitalCommons@TMC. It has been accepted for inclusion in The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center UTHealth Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences Dissertations and Theses (Open Access) by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@TMC. For more information, please contact [email protected]. NEURAL CORRELATES OF AUDIOVISUAL SPEECH PERCEPTION IN APHASIA AND HEALTHY AGING by Sarah Haller Baum, B.S. APPROVED: ______________________________ -
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Libri Phonetica 1999;56:105–107 = Part I, ‘Introduction’, includes a single Winifred Strange chapter written by the editor. It is an Speech Perception and Linguistic excellent historical review of cross-lan- Experience: Issues in Cross-Language guage studies in speech perception pro- Research viding a clear conceptual framework of York Press, Timonium, 1995 the topic. Strange presents a selective his- 492 pp.; $ 59 tory of research that highlights the main ISBN 0–912752–36–X theoretical themes and methodological paradigms. It begins with a brief descrip- How is speech perception shaped by tion of the basic phenomena that are the experience with our native language and starting points for the investigation: the by exposure to subsequent languages? constancy problem and the question of This is a central research question in units of analysis in speech perception. language perception, which emphasizes Next, the author presents the principal the importance of crosslinguistic studies. theories, methods, findings and limita- Speech Perception and Linguistic Experi- tions in early cross-language research, ence: Issues in Cross-Language Research focused on categorical perception as the contains the contributions to a Workshop dominant paradigm in the study of adult in Cross-Language Perception held at the and infant perception in the 1960s and University of South Florida, Tampa, Fla., 1970s. Finally, Strange reviews the most USA, in May 1992. important findings and conclusions in This text may be said to represent recent cross-language research (1980s and the first compilation strictly focused on early 1990s), which yielded a large theoretical and methodological issues of amount of new information from a wider cross-language perception research. -
Beyond Laurel/Yanny
Beyond Laurel/Yanny: An Autoencoder-Enabled Search for Polyperceivable Audio Kartik Chandra Chuma Kabaghe Stanford University Stanford University [email protected] [email protected] Gregory Valiant Stanford University [email protected] Abstract How common is this phenomenon? Specifically, what fraction of spoken language is “polyperceiv- The famous “laurel/yanny” phenomenon refer- able” in the sense of evoking a multimodal re- ences an audio clip that elicits dramatically dif- ferent responses from different listeners. For sponse in a population of listeners? In this work, the original clip, roughly half the popula- we provide initial results suggesting a significant tion hears the word “laurel,” while the other density of spoken words that, like the original “lau- half hears “yanny.” How common are such rel/yanny” clip, lie close to unexpected decision “polyperceivable” audio clips? In this paper boundaries between seemingly unrelated pairs of we apply ML techniques to study the preva- words or sounds, such that individual listeners can lence of polyperceivability in spoken language. switch between perceptual modes via a slight per- We devise a metric that correlates with polyper- ceivability of audio clips, use it to efficiently turbation. find new “laurel/yanny”-type examples, and validate these results with human experiments. The clips we consider consist of audio signals Our results suggest that polyperceivable ex- amples are surprisingly prevalent, existing for synthesized by the Amazon Polly speech synthe- >2% of -
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THE APPLICATION OF ILLUSIONS AND PSYCHOACOUSTICS TO SMALL LOUDSPEAKER CONFIGURATIONS RONALD M. AARTS Philips Research Europe, HTC 36 (WO 02) Eindhoven, The Netherlands An overview of some auditory illusions is given, two of which will be considered in more detail for the application of small loudspeaker configurations. The requirements for a good sound reproduction system generally conflict with those of consumer products regarding both size and price. A possible solution lies in enhancing listener perception and reproduction of sound by exploiting a combination of psychoacoustics, loudspeaker configurations and digital signal processing. The first example is based on the missing fundamental concept, the second on the combination of frequency mapping and a special driver. INTRODUCTION applications of even smaller size this lower limit can A brief overview of some auditory illusions is given easily be as high as several hundred hertz. The bass which serves merely as a ‘catalogue’, rather than a portion of an audio signal contributes significantly to lengthy discussion. A related topic to auditory illusions the sound ‘impact’, and depending on the bass quality, is the interaction between different sensory modalities, the overall sound quality will shift up or down. e.g. sound and vision, a famous example is the Therefore a good low-frequency reproduction is McGurk effect (‘Hearing lips and seeing voices’) [1]. essential. An auditory-visual overview is given in [2], a more general multisensory product perception in [3], and on ILLUSIONS spatial orientation in [4]. The influence of video quality An illusion is a distortion of a sensory perception, on perceived audio quality is discussed in [5]. -
Relations Between Speech Production and Speech Perception: Some Behavioral and Neurological Observations
14 Relations between Speech Production and Speech Perception: Some Behavioral and Neurological Observations Willem J. M. Levelt One Agent, Two Modalities There is a famous book that never appeared: Bever and Weksel (shelved). It contained chapters by several young Turks in the budding new psycho- linguistics community of the mid-1960s. Jacques Mehler’s chapter (coau- thored with Harris Savin) was entitled “Language Users.” A normal language user “is capable of producing and understanding an infinite number of sentences that he has never heard before. The central problem for the psychologist studying language is to explain this fact—to describe the abilities that underlie this infinity of possible performances and state precisely how these abilities, together with the various details . of a given situation, determine any particular performance.” There is no hesi tation here about the psycholinguist’s core business: it is to explain our abilities to produce and to understand language. Indeed, the chapter’s purpose was to review the available research findings on these abilities and it contains, correspondingly, a section on the listener and another section on the speaker. This balance was quickly lost in the further history of psycholinguistics. With the happy and important exceptions of speech error and speech pausing research, the study of language use was factually reduced to studying language understanding. For example, Philip Johnson-Laird opened his review of experimental psycholinguistics in the 1974 Annual Review of Psychology with the statement: “The fundamental problem of psycholinguistics is simple to formulate: what happens if we understand sentences?” And he added, “Most of the other problems would be half way solved if only we had the answer to this question.” One major other 242 W. -
Colored-Speech Synaesthesia Is Triggered by Multisensory, Not Unisensory, Perception Gary Bargary,1,2,3 Kylie J
PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE Research Report Colored-Speech Synaesthesia Is Triggered by Multisensory, Not Unisensory, Perception Gary Bargary,1,2,3 Kylie J. Barnett,1,2,3 Kevin J. Mitchell,2,3 and Fiona N. Newell1,2 1School of Psychology, 2Institute of Neuroscience, and 3Smurfit Institute of Genetics, Trinity College Dublin ABSTRACT—Although it is estimated that as many as 4% of sistent terminology reflects an underlying lack of understanding people experience some form of enhanced cross talk be- about the amount of information processing required for syn- tween (or within) the senses, known as synaesthesia, very aesthesia to be induced. For example, several studies have little is understood about the level of information pro- found that synaesthesia can occur very rapidly (Palmeri, Blake, cessing required to induce a synaesthetic experience. In Marois, & Whetsell, 2002; Ramachandran & Hubbard, 2001; work presented here, we used a well-known multisensory Smilek, Dixon, Cudahy, & Merikle, 2001) and is sensitive to illusion called the McGurk effect to show that synaesthesia changes in low-level properties of the inducing stimulus, such as is driven by late, perceptual processing, rather than early, contrast (Hubbard, Manoha, & Ramachandran, 2006) or font unisensory processing. Specifically, we tested 9 linguistic- (Witthoft & Winawer, 2006). These findings suggest that syn- color synaesthetes and found that the colors induced by aesthesia is an automatic association driven by early, unisensory spoken words are related to what is perceived (i.e., the input. However, attention, semantic information, and feature- illusory combination of audio and visual inputs) and not to binding processes (Dixon, Smilek, Duffy, Zanna, & Merikle, the auditory component alone. -
Categorical Perception of Consonants and Vowels: Evidence from a Neurophonetic Model of Speech Production and Perception
Categorical Perception of Consonants and Vowels: Evidence from a Neurophonetic Model of Speech Production and Perception Bernd J. Kröger, Peter Birkholz, Jim Kannampuzha, and Christiane Neuschaefer-Rube Department of Phoniatrics, Pedaudiology, and Communication Disorders, University Hospital Aachen and RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany {bkroeger,pbirkholz,jkannampuzha,cneuschaefer}@ukaachen.de Abstract. While the behavioral side of categorical perception in speech is al- ready well investigated, little is known concerning its underlying neural mecha- nisms. In this study, a computer-implemented neurophonetic model of speech production and perception is used in order to elucidate the functional neural mechanisms responsible for categorical perception. 20 instances of the model (“virtual listeners/speakers”) underwent a speech acquisition training procedure and then performed behavioral tests, i.e. identification and discrimination expe- riments based on vocalic and CV-syllabic speech stimuli. These virtual listeners showed the expected behavioral results. The inspection of the neural organi- zation of virtual listeners indicated clustering in the case of categorical percep- tion and no clustering in the case of non-categorical (continuous) perception for neurons representing the stimuli. These results highlight a possible neural or- ganization underlying categorical and continuous perception. Keywords: speech perception, categorical perception, identification, discrimi- nation, neural model of speech production. 1 Introduction Categorical perception is an important feature of speech, needed for successfully differentiating and identifying sounds, syllables, or words. Categorical speech per- ception enables humans to map different realizations of one speech sound into one category. This is important in order to achieve a robust discrimination of different speech items, even if these items are realized by different speakers or by different articulations of the same speaker. -
Effects of Sign Language Experience on Categorical Perception of Dynamic ASL Pseudosigns
Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics 2010, 72 (3), 747-762 doi:10.3758/APP.72.3.747 Effects of sign language experience on categorical perception of dynamic ASL pseudosigns CATHERINE T. BEST University of Western Sydney, Penrith, New South Wales, Australia and Haskins Laboratories, New Haven, Connecticut GAURAV MATHUR Gallaudet University, Washington, D.C. and Haskins Laboratories, New Haven, Connecticut KAREN A. M IRANDA Massachusetts School of Professional Psychology, Boston, Massachusetts AND DIANE LI ll O -MARTIN University of Connecticut, Storrs, Connecticut and Haskins Laboratories, New Haven, Connecticut We investigated effects of sign language experience on deaf and hearing participants’ categorical perception of minimal manual contrast stimuli that met key criteria of speech perception research. A continuum of meaningless dynamic stimuli was created with a morphing approach, which manipulated videorecorded productions of phono- tactically permissible pseudosigns differing between American Sign Language (ASL) handshapes that contrast on a single articulatory dimension (U–V: finger-spreading). AXB discrimination and AXB categorization and goodness ratings on the target items were completed by deaf early (native) signers (DE), deaf late (nonnative) signers (DL), hearing late (L2) signers (HL), and hearing nonsigners (HN). Categorization and goodness functions were less categorical and had different boundaries for DL participants than for DE and HL participants. Shape and level of discrimination functions also differed by ASL experience and hearing status, with DL signers showing better perfor- mance than DE, HL, and especially HN participants, particularly at the U end of the continuum. Although no group displayed a peak in discrimination at the category boundary, thus failing to support classic categorical perception, discrimination was consistent with categorization in other ways that differed among the groups. -
Linguistic Effect on Speech Perception Observed at the Brainstem
Linguistic effect on speech perception observed at the brainstem T. Christina Zhaoa and Patricia K. Kuhla,1 aInstitute for Learning & Brain Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195 Contributed by Patricia K. Kuhl, May 10, 2018 (sent for review January 5, 2018; reviewed by Bharath Chandrasekaran and Robert J. Zatorre) Linguistic experience affects speech perception from early infancy, as 11 mo of age were observed to be significantly reduced compared previously evidenced by behavioral and brain measures. Current with MMRs observed at 7 mo age (15). research focuses on whether linguistic effects on speech perception The current study set out to examine whether the effects of lin- canbeobservedatanearlierstageinthe neural processing of speech guistic experience on consonant perception already manifest at a (i.e., auditory brainstem). Brainstem responses reflect rapid, auto- deeper and earlier stage than the cortex, namely, at the level of matic, and preattentive encoding of sounds. Positive experiential auditory brainstem. The auditory brainstem encodes acoustic in- effects have been reported by examining the frequency-following formation and relays them to the auditory cortex. Its activity can be response (FFR) component of the complex auditory brainstem recorded noninvasively at the scalp using a simple setup of three response (cABR) in response to sustained high-energy periodic electroencephalographic (EEG) electrodes (16). Using extremely portions of speech sounds (vowels and lexical tones). The current brief stimuli such as clicks or tone pips, the auditory brainstem re- study expands the existing literature by examining the cABR onset sponse (ABR) can be elicited and has been used clinically to assess component in response to transient and low-energy portions of the integrity of the auditory pathway (17). -
Enhanced Sensitivity to Subphonemic Segments in Dyslexia: a New Instance of Allophonic Perception
brain sciences Article Enhanced Sensitivity to Subphonemic Segments in Dyslexia: A New Instance of Allophonic Perception Willy Serniclaes 1,* and M’ballo Seck 2 1 Speech Perception Lab., CNRS & Paris Descartes University, 75006 Paris, France 2 Human & Artificial Cognition Lab., Paris 8 University, 93526 Saint-Denis, France; [email protected] * Correspondence: [email protected] or [email protected]; Tel.: +33-680-230-886 Received: 28 February 2018; Accepted: 22 March 2018; Published: 26 March 2018 Abstract: Although dyslexia can be individuated in many different ways, it has only three discernable sources: a visual deficit that affects the perception of letters, a phonological deficit that affects the perception of speech sounds, and an audio-visual deficit that disturbs the association of letters with speech sounds. However, the very nature of each of these core deficits remains debatable. The phonological deficit in dyslexia, which is generally attributed to a deficit of phonological awareness, might result from a specific mode of speech perception characterized by the use of allophonic (i.e., subphonemic) units. Here we will summarize the available evidence and present new data in support of the “allophonic theory” of dyslexia. Previous studies have shown that the dyslexia deficit in the categorical perception of phonemic features (e.g., the voicing contrast between /t/ and /d/) is due to the enhanced sensitivity to allophonic features (e.g., the difference between two variants of /d/). Another consequence of allophonic perception is that it should also give rise to an enhanced sensitivity to allophonic segments, such as those that take place within a consonant cluster. -
Perception and Awareness in Phonological Processing: the Case of the Phoneme
See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: http://www.researchgate.net/publication/222609954 Perception and awareness in phonological processing: the case of the phoneme ARTICLE in COGNITION · APRIL 1994 Impact Factor: 3.63 · DOI: 10.1016/0010-0277(94)90032-9 CITATIONS DOWNLOADS VIEWS 67 45 94 2 AUTHORS: José Morais Regine Kolinsky Université Libre de Bruxelles Université Libre de Bruxelles 92 PUBLICATIONS 1,938 CITATIONS 103 PUBLICATIONS 1,571 CITATIONS SEE PROFILE SEE PROFILE Available from: Regine Kolinsky Retrieved on: 15 July 2015 Cognition, 50 (1994) 287-297 OOlO-0277/94/$07.00 0 1994 - Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. Perception and awareness in phonological processing: the case of the phoneme JosC Morais*, RCgine Kolinsky Laboratoire de Psychologie exptrimentale, Universitt Libre de Bruxelles, Av. Ad. Buy1 117, B-l 050 Bruxelles, Belgium Abstract The necessity of a “levels-of-processing” approach in the study of mental repre- sentations is illustrated by the work on the psychological reality of the phoneme. On the basis of both experimental studies of human behavior and functional imaging data, it is argued that there are unconscious representations of phonemes in addition to conscious ones. These two sets of mental representations are func- tionally distinct: the former intervene in speech perception and (presumably) production; the latter are developed in the context of learning alphabetic literacy for both reading and writing purposes. Moreover, among phonological units and properties, phonemes may be the only ones to present a neural dissociation at the macro-anatomic level. Finally, it is argued that even if the representations used in speech perception and those used in assembling and in conscious operations are distinct, they may entertain dependency relations.