Chapter 8 – Speech and other language issues

In this chapter, we consider how people can perceive and recognise speech. This is harder than you might imagine. Unlike written words which have a space between them, spoken words often run together and, unlike written text, once uttered, the signal disappears. Yet we are able to understand speakers of our own language remarkably efficiently. We discuss some models of spoken word recognition before moving on to consider producing longer strings of speech than single words: sentences. We then move away from speech to consider some other aspects of language such as language and thought, bilingualism, and language and ageing.

Chapter 8 – Introduction

Transcript

  • Chapter 8 – Flashcards

    co-articulation

    Individual phonemes or basic speech sounds are pronounced differently according to the phonemes immediately preceding or following them speech perception.

    phoneme

    The smallest sound unit that combines with other sound units to make words. ‘Ship’ has 3 phonemes: /ʃ/, /ɪ/, /p/. The symbols used are from the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and are used by phoneticians (experts in phonetics) to accurately transcribe the sounds used in different languages.

    acoustic

    Related to sound or hearing.

    speech perception

    The ability to distinguish speech sounds from other sounds such as background noise

    hypotheses

    A hypothesis (plural, hypotheses) is a prediction about the outcome of an experiment, based on theory and/or previous research. The results from an experiment can then either provide support for or against the hypothesis.

    McGurk effect

    An auditory illusion which occurs when a person’s lip movements and the sounds they produce do not match up. For example, if the lips are making the shape that corresponds to ‘ga’ but the sound being made is ‘ba’, the listener will typically hear ‘da’.

    aphasia

    Problems with language or speech, usually caused by damage to the left side of the brain following a head injury, stroke or other damage.

    paraphasia

    Error in language output causes by aphasia.

    lemma

    A modality neutral representation of the syntactic and semantic properties of a word.

    pragmatics

    The study of meaning that goes beyond the literal level and focuses on what is inferred from the context in which an utterance is made.

    lexica

    Lexica is the plural of lexicon, meaning store of words.

    cognate

    Words that share the same origins (or etymology) and meaning such as classification in English and clasificación in Spanish. When learning a language, these are useful but beware of false friends which look the same but mean different things, une journée in French, which means day and not journey.

    homograph

    A word that is spelt the same as another word (e.g., bank meaning building where you deposit money and bank meaning side of the river). Often these are also homophones – they sound the same, like bank, but some can be pronounced differently, like lead (the metal) and lead (the opposite of to follow).

  • Chapter 8 – Weblinks

Chapter 8 – Quiz

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