Outline: Speech Perception

Speech areas in the brain and aphasias

Wernicke's area and speech perception
Broca's area and speech production

Speech perception as auditory pattern recognition

Speech sounds - phonemes, morphemes and words

Phoneme classification - based on production

Vowels vs. consonants

Vowels

Tongue position

High/Mid/Low

Front/Back

The vowel quadrilateral

Lips - Rounding or not

Diphthongs

Consonants

Place of articulation

Labial, labio-dental, palatal, glottal, etc.

Voicing

Type of articulation

Stop/plosive - p/b, t/d, k/g

Fricatives and sibilants, f/v, th ("thick" vs. "the"), sh/zh, s/z, non-English ones

Affricates - tch

Laterals - l, r

Glides - y, w

Nasals - m, n

Clicks - xh as in Xhosa

Distinctive features, generative phonology

Spectrograms - Intensity as a function of time and frequency

"Reading" spectrograms

Banding

Pitch/harmonics as multiples of the fundamental (F0)

Prosody

Vowel sounds

Peaks = formants (F1, F2, F3)

Consonants

Noise segments

Band determines which for fricatives/sibilants

Presence of banding determines voicing

Silence for stops/plosives

Cues from formant transitions

Duration (bed, wet, cruet)

Transitions point back to a fixed value that depends on the preceding consonant

Tests - using vocoder

Categorical perception

Units of speech

Shadowing

Perceived temporal position of a click

Chopping from ear to ear

Perception

Infants can make some distinctions

Some are learned (e.g., French z/th, Chinese/Japanese r/l)

Motor theory: Analysis by Synthesis

Hearing and vision

The McGurk effect

Lip reading