Deck 4: Perception of Language

Question 1

Researchers studying __________ are most likely to make use of a speech spectrogram.

A) sociolinguistics
B) acoustic phonetics
C) articulatory phonetics
D) phonology

Answer 1

articulatory phonetics

Question 2

The speech sounds [t], [d], and [s] are instances of:

A) voiced consonants
B) alveolar consonants
C) fricative consonants
D) stop consonants

Answer 2

alveolar consonants

Question 3

________ are produced by impeding the airflow at some location in the vocal tract.

A) Vowels
B) Semi-vowels
C) Consonants
D) Formants

Answer 3

Consonants

Question 4

________ refers to the fact that acoustic properties of different phonemes overlap in time in the speech signal.

A) Coarticulation
B) Context-conditioned variation
C) Rate of speech
D) Parallel transmission

Question 5

A general term that refers to the aspects of an utterance's sound that are not specific to the words themselves (for example, intonation and rate) is:

A) prosody
B) intonation
C) stress
D) rate

Question 6

The delay in the release of vocal cord vibration between the release of a consonant and the start of a vowel is called:

A) frication
B) voice onset time
C) a formant transition
D) a glide

Question 7

The acoustic information that specifies a phoneme will change based on preceding or following phonemes. This is known as:

A) parallel transmission
B) coarticulation
C) formant interaction
D) context-conditioned variation

Question 8

The use of pitch to signify different meanings is:

A) stress
B) rate
C) intonation
D) prosody

Question 9

In English, there is a rising intonation in:

A) wh-questions
B) yes/no questions
C) both wh- and yes/no question
D) neither wh- nor yes/no questions

Question 10

The consonants /b/, /d/, and /g/ differ in their ________

A) manner of articulation
B) place of articulation
C) frication
D) voicing

Question 11

The speech sounds [p], [b], and [k] are instances of:

A) velar consonants
B) stop consonants
C) voiced consonants
D) alveolar consonants

Question 12

Consonants that are articulated at the lips are called _____ consonants.

A) alveolar
B) stop
C) bilabial
D) fricative

Question 13

In a study on categorical perception, listeners hear two sounds and then a third, and determine if the third sound was the same as the first or the second. Results show that:

A) performance is at chance if the two sounds are from the same phonetic category
B) performance is poor at the outset but listeners improve significantly with practice
C) performance is better if the two sounds are from the same phonetic category than if they are from different phonetic categories
D) all of the above

Question 14

The lack of invariance refers to the fact that there is no one-to-one correspondence between:

A) formant transitions and steady states
B) acoustic cues and perceptual experience
C) articulatory processes and acoustic cues
D) speech signals and neurological processes

Question 15

The production of vowels is characterized by:

A) whether they are voiced or unvoiced
B) the location of constriction in the vocal tract
C) the position and height of the tongue
D) the degree of frication

Question 16

The words blue and blew are:

A) allophones
B) homophones
C) logographs
D) suprasegmentals

Question 17

A formant is:

A) a location in the vocal tract
B) a rapid movement of the eye
C) a band of energy in a spectrogram
D) a stroke of a Chinese character

Question 18

The study of speech sounds that references the movements within the vocal tract is:

A) acoustic phonetics
B) speech perception
C) categorical perception
D) articulatory phonetics

Question 19

For speech processing to be modular it must:

A) be slow
B) share properties with general auditory processing
C) be affected by feedback
D) be domain specific

Question 20

The phenomenon of producing more than one speech sound at a time is called:

A) coarticulation
B) context-conditioned variation
C) parallel transmission
D) formant interaction

Question 21

The fact that we can perceive letters in a word context better than individual letters is referred to as:

A) the interactive activation effect
B) the word-superiority effect
C) the phonemic restoration effect
D) mispronunciation detection

Question 22

The dual-route model explains how we can:

A) pronounce words we've never seen before
B) identify real words faster than non-words
C) identify isolated words that have been excised from fluent speech
D) choose among multiple meanings of ambiguous words

Question 23

The connectionist model showing that various levels of speech processing occur simultaneously and interactively is known as: (the):

A) motor theory
B) TRACE model
C) modularity
D) dual-route model

Question 24

Studies by Warren and colleagues indicate that if a speech sound in a sentence is replaced by a cough, listeners still perceive the sound. This is called:

A) categorical perception
B) phonemic restoration
C) shadowing effect
D) rate normalization

Question 25

VOT is a(n) __________ and ___________ cue to voicing in stop consonants.

A) unreliable; variable
B) unreliable; invariant
C) reliable; variable
D) reliable; invariant

Question 26

Studies of mispronunciation detection have found that restorations are:

A) more fluent than exact repetitions
B) more common than exact repetition
C) less common than exact repetitions
D) less fluent than exact repetitions

Question 27

Pollack and Pickett (1964) showed that when a word is isolated from its context it becomes:

A) completely unintelligible
B) more intelligible than in context
C) less intelligible than in context
D) just as intelligible as in context

Question 28

The movements of the eyes during reading are called:

A) fixations
B) fegressions
C) saccades
D) radicals

Question 29

Studies of categorical perception have found that:

A) it occurs for both consonants and vowels
B) it only occurs with intact speech syllables
C) it is found with chirps and bleats, but not backward syllables
D) it only occurs with consonants

Question 30

McGurk and MacDonald (1976) found that when a speaker's lips produce the syllable /ga/ while an audio tape of the sound /ba/ is played, listeners hear the fused sound as:

A) /ga/
B) /ba/
C) /da/
D) a nonspeech chirp

Question 31

Phonemic restoration and mispronunciation studies reveal the effects of __________ information in speech processing.

A) bottom-up
B) top-down
C) invariant
D) prosodic

Question 32

Readers pick up visual information:

A) during a saccade
B) during a fixation
C) during a regression
D) during a trace

Question 33

The motor theory of speech perception:

A) contends that we perceive speech by reference to production
B) states that perception and production operate independently
C) is inconsistent with the notion of a phonetic module
D) focuses on speech dysfluency

Question 34

Neisser 's (1964) study of visual search, in which subjects search a list of letters for a target letter, provided evidence for the role of _____ in the perception of written language.

A) fixations
B) saccades
C) regressions
D) features

Question 35

___________ maps sounds of language onto written symbols or characters

A) Logography
B) Orthography
C) Syllabary
D) Radicals

Question 36

We use _____ to distinguish between the two meanings of blackbird.

A) Intonation
B) stress
C) both (a) and (b)
D) neither (a) nor (b)