Deck 13: Speech Perception

Question 1

 The _____ is the shortest segment of speech that, if changed, changes the meaning of the word.

A) formant
B) phoneme
C) tadoma
D) morpheme

Answer 1

B

Question 2

 There are _____ phonemes for vowel sounds in the English language.

A) two
B) five?
C) six
D) thirteen

Answer 2

D

Question 3

 The McGurk effect illustrates the importance of _____ on speech perception.

A) the motor cortex
B) articulators
C) formants
D) vision

Answer 3

D

Question 4

 The voice onset time (VOT) for the sound /da/ is 17 ms, and the VOT for the sound /ta/ is 91 msec. When a computer produces a sound with a VOT of 65 ms, listeners are likely to report hearing _____.

A) the /da/ sound
B) the /ta/ sound
C) the /ja/ sound
D) a combination of /ta/ and /da/

Question 5

 Computer speech recognition is _____.

A) better than human speech recognition under any condition
B) better than human speech recognition in accuracy
C) equal in all respects to human speech recognition
D) poorer than human speech recognition

Question 6

 Which of the following can be considered an articulator

A) a sound spectrogram
B) a running spectral display
C) the soft palate
D) an articulation agreement

Question 7

 When you say "bat" and "boot," the /b/ sound is articulated differently. This is an example of _____.

A) phoneme contiguity
B) phoneme congruity
C) coarticulation
D) alveolar context

Question 8

 The vowel sound /ae/ (as in "had") has _____.

A) a single formant
B) two formants
C) three formants
D) no formants

Question 9

 As you produce the sound _____, you place your tongue against the ridge above your upper teeth and then release a slight rush of air as you move your tongue away from the alveolar ridge.

A) /d/
B) /g/
C) /r/
D) /f/

Question 10

 The existence of phonetic boundaries _____.

A) is currently debated among speech perception researchers
B) only occurs at VOTs of greater than 250 ms
C) has been demonstrated using discrimination experiments
D) shows that categorical perception does not occur in speech perception

Question 11

 Listening to someone speak a foreign language you are not familiar with can lead to _____.

A) the correspondence problem
B) the segmentation problem
C) the formant transition effect?
D) acoustic signaling

Question 12

 Humans perceive the sound /b/ to be the same, even when the coarticulation of the sound is different. This phenomenon is an example of _____.

A) perceptual constancy
B) acoustic consistency
C) phonemic transitions
D) the segmentation problem

Question 13

 Spectrograms of sentences show _____.

A) that clear pauses occur between each spoken word
B) that formant transitions account for the breaks between words
C) no clear pauses or breaks between words
D) segmentation of words is easily accomplished by listeners in any context

Question 14

 A sound spectrogram is a plot of _____ as a function of _____, with darker areas representing greater intensity.

A) frequency; time
B) amplitude; frequency
C) time; amplitude
D) time; spatial location of sound source

Question 15

 The McGurk effect is most similar to which of the following performers

A) ventriloquists
B) hockey players
C) ballet dancers
D) gymnasts

Question 16

 Research using fMRI has found that, although _____ is activated when paying attention to the sounds of familiar voices, it is NOT activated when paying attention to the sounds of unfamiliar voices.

A) the FFA
B) the STS
C) Wernicke's area
D) Broca's area

Question 17

 The overlap between the production of neighboring phonemes is called _____.

A) contiguity
B) Consolidation
C) coarticulation
D) Context

Question 18

 Rubin et al. (1976) asked participants to respond when they heard a word that started with the /b/ sound. The average response time when real words were used was _____; and _____ when non-words were used.

A) 100 msec; 57 msec
B) 580 msec; 631 msec
C) 995 msec; 900 msec
D) 1.87 sec; 1.88 sec

Question 19

 The ubiquitous "Whazzup!" is a sloppy pronunciation of "What's up
The spectrograms of each of these two spoken phrases would indicate _____.

A) no difference in the spectrograms between the two phrases
B) only a difference in the frequency axis between the two phrases
C) that there is a pause in the middle of "What's up
D) major differences between the two, especially in the middle of the spectrograms

Question 20

 Jessica looks at Ashlee on a videotape. Ashlee's lips are making the movement for the sound /fa-fa/, but the sound that is actually presented is the acoustic signal for /ba-ba/. What sound is Jessica most likely to report hearing

A) /fa-fa/
B) /ba-ba/
C) /da-da/
D) /ta-ta/

Question 21

 Brain scanning research has shown that the _____ is responsible for identifying sounds, and the _____ is responsible for locating sounds.

A) "where" (dorsal) stream; what" (ventral) stream
B) "what" (ventral) stream; "where" (dorsal) stream
C) corpus callosum; "where" (dorsal) stream
D) Pacinian area; what" (ventral) stream

Question 22

 Warren showed that when a cough sound replaced the sound of the first /s/ in the word "legislatures," listeners reported hearing _____.

A) just the cough sound where the /s/ was originally
B) just the cough sound because it masked the whole word
C) just the /s/ sound
D) the cough and the /s/ sound, but the cough position was not correctly identified

Question 23

 A person with Wernicke's aphasia _____.

A) has damage to an area of the occipital cortex
B) can comprehend words, but can't produce speech
C) has trouble with word segmentation
D) produces fluent but incoherent speech

Question 24

 Damage to Broca's area in the frontal lobe results in _____.

A) slow, labored speech with jumbled sentence order.
B) slow, labored speech with appropriate sentence order
C) fluent but incoherent speech
D) an inability to understand even simple sentences

Question 25

 A fan of science fiction television shows would be more likely to make sense of the phrase "Start Wreck In Tore Prize." This demonstrates the importance of _____.

A) the McGurk effect on speech perception
B) bottom-up processing on phomenic boundaries
C) articulators in speech production
D) meaning on segmentation

Question 26

 Saffran et al. (1996) found that the ability to use transitional probabilities to segment sounds develops around the age of _____.

A) 2 months
B) 8 months
C) 18 months
D) 2 years

Question 27

 The discovery of _____ is used as support for the motor theory of speech perception.

A) Broca's area
B) Wernicke's area
C) audiovisual mirror neurons
D) simple cells in area V1

Question 28

 Marta works at an information kiosk in an airport and she frequently encounters people who are not native speakers of her first language but to their credit, try to ask questions using it. Given that she will have limited contact with the individuals, she will most likely be able to understand what is being asked if she focuses on _____.

A) indexical characteristics
B) segmentation effects
C) lip reading effects
D) general meaning

Question 29

 The ability to categorize speech sounds is found in infants as young as _____ month(s) old.

A) one
B) three
C) six
D) ten

Question 30

 Miller and Isard presented listeners with grammatical sentences ("Gadgets simplify work around the house"); ungrammatical word strings ("Between gadgets highways passengers the steal"), and anomalous sentences ("Gadgets kill passengers from the eyes"). The results showed that the listener's ability to accurately report the phrase was _____.

A) highest for the grammatical condition, followed by ungrammatical, and then anomalous
B) highest for the grammatical condition, followed by anomalous, and then ungrammatical
C) the same for grammatical and anomalous, which were both better than ungrammatical
D) the same for all three conditions

Question 31

 Saffran et al. (1996) found that eight-month-old infants listened to _____ test stimuli longer, providing evidence that infants are capable of _____ learning.

A) whole word; vicarious
B) whole word; transitional probability
C) part word; statistical
D) part word; formal operational

Question 32

 Japanese children at the age of _______ can tell the difference between the /r/ sound and the /l/ sound just as well as American children.

A) six months?
B) one year
C) two years
D) five years

Question 33

 Using fMRI, Belin et al., (2000) were able to reveal that, in humans, the superior temporal sulcus (STS) is _____.

A) activated more for human voices than for other sounds
B) activated for any sound that falls in the same frequency range as the human voice
C) responsible for coordinating conflicting visual and auditory information
D) responsible for phoneme segmentation

Question 34

 _____ speech is created by dividing the speech signal up into different frequency bands and then adding noise to each band.

A) Noise-vocoded
B) Reconstructed
C) Nonsense
D) Imprecise

Question 35

 Micelli et al. (1980) found that brain damage to the parietal lobe caused the patient to have difficulty discriminating between syllables. In addition, Micelli et al. found that _____.

A) all these patients could not understand words
B) all these patients had "word deafness"
C) some of these patients could not hear pure tones
D) some of these patients could still understand words

Question 36

 Your ability to read the sentence "H*V* A N*C* D*Y" is used as an example of the importance of _____.

A) bottom-up processing
B) top-down processing
C) audiovisual speech perception
D) sideways processing

Question 37

 Masakazu is a four-month-old Japanese infant. When presented the phonemes /r/ and /l/, he will _____.

A) not be able to discriminate between these two phonemes
B) be able to discriminate between these two phonemes
C) need the VOT changed to 10 msec to discriminate between the two phonemes
D) spontaneously mimic the /r/, but not the /l/

Question 38

 Alessandro D'Ausilio and coworkers (2009) demonstrated a link between production and perception by showing that stimulation of motor areas associated with the lip resulted in _____.

A) better perception of labial sounds
B) better perception of nonlabial sounds
C) degraded perception of labial sounds
D) degraded perception of nonlabial sounds

Question 39

 Samuel (1990) demonstrated top-down processing by showing that _____ words increase the likelihood of the phonemic restoration effect.

A) shorter
B) descriptive
C) evocative
D) longer

Question 40

 Matthew Davis and coworkers (2005) tested subjects to determine their ability to perceive degraded speech and found that _____.

A) higher level information can help in understanding degraded speech
B) in general, nonacoustic factors have no influence on speech perception
C) knowing what is being said is less important than how it is said
D) multimodal processing occurs only following explicit and intense training

Question 41

 Discuss Broca's and Wernicke's aphasia.

Question 42

 Kuhl's research involving exposing infants from English-speaking homes to stories read in Mandarin found that _____.

A) having the reader present with the infant was effective in teaching the infants to discriminate among Mandarin sounds, but a DVD of the same reader reading the same stories was not
B) having the reader present with the infant was not effective in teaching the infants to discriminate among Mandarin sounds, but a DVD of the same reader reading the same stories was very effective
C) having the reader present with the infant was effective in teaching the infants to discriminate among Mandarin sounds, as was a DVD of the same reader reading the same stories
D) having the reader present with the infant was effective in teaching the infants to discriminate among Mandarin sounds, as was a DVD of the same reader reading the same stories, but only when the infants were at least 18 months old

Question 43

 Discuss the methods and results of two studies of the phonemic restoration effect.

Question 44

 Discuss the motor theory of speech perception.

Question 45

 What is noise vocoded speech and what has been learned using it?

Question 46

 Describe how voice onset times (VOTs) have been used to study categorical perception.

Question 47

 Discuss two sources of the variability problem. Provide examples for each.

Question 48

 What is the McGurk effect
What evidence exists for the physiological basis for this effect?

Question 49

 Discuss what information is used by listeners to accomplish speech segmentation.

Question 50

 Discuss the "dual-stream model of speech perception." Briefly describe research that supports this model.