Speech Perception
Speech perception is the ability to comprehend speech through listening. Mankind is constantly being bombarded by acoustical energy. The challenge to humanity is to translate this energy into meaningful data. Speech perception is not dependent on the extraction of simple invariant acoustic patterns in the speech waveform. The sound's acoustic pattern is complex and greatly varies. It is dependent upon the preceding and following sounds (Moore, 1997). According to Fant (1973), speech perception is a process consisting of both successive and concurrent identification on a series of progressively more abstract levels of linguistic structure.
Nature of Speech Sounds
Phonemes are the smallest unit of sound. In any given language words are formed by combining these phonemes. English has approximately 40 different phonemes that are defined in terms of what is perceived, rather than in terms of acoustic patterns. Phonemes are abstract, subjective entities that are often specified in terms of how they are produced. Alone they have no meaning, but in combination they form words (Moore, 1997).
In speech there are vowels and consonants. Consonants are produced by constricting the vocal tract at some point along its length. These sounds are classified into different types according to the degree and nature of the constriction. The types are stops, affricates, fricatives, nasals, and approximants. Vowels are usually voiced and are relatively stable over time Moore, 1997).
Categorical Perception
Categorical perception implies definite identification of the stimuli. The main point in this area is that the listener can only correctly distinguish speech sounds to the extent that they are identified a...
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The study of synesthesia has grown exponentially over the past few decades and as a result there is some level of ambiguity as to the scope of what defines it. Gail Martino and Lawrence Mark propose that synesthesia can be categorized into strong or weak. The former refers to those who experience “a vivid image in one sensory in response to stimulation in another”, whereas the latter is characterized as “cross-sensory correspondence[s] expressed through language, perceptual similarity and perceptual interactions during information processing” (Martino and Marks, 2001). This view implies that even the subtlest forms of cross-modal interactions that take place in the individual, albeit associating certain sounds to sight, deserve some credibility as being a form of synesthesia. Such a wide scope implies that far more people can experience some type of synesthesia even if its not necessarily the more exaggerated and rare forms like lexical-gustatory and grapheme color.
The primary role of the phonological loop is to store mental representations of auditory information (in Passer, 2009). It has limited capacity and holds information in a speech based form. It is further subdivided into two more components; the articulatory rehearsal system which has a limited capacity of 2 seconds and rehearses information verbally and is linked to speech production and the phonological store which temporarily holds speech based information (in Smith, 2007)
The article begins by defining phonemic awareness and gives examples which gave me a better grasp of the topic. Phonemic awareness gives a person the ability to hear the difference between sounds in words even when they sound similar such as the words “sat” and “sit”. Phonemic awareness is a division of the larg...
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In the partial alphabetic phase individuals pay attention to different letters in a word in order to attempt its pronunciation, usually the first and final letters of a word are focused on, Ehri referred to this as ‘phonetic cue reading’. This is a skill which along with others which shows phonological awareness.
The acoustic speech signal itself can be analysed by creating spectrograms. Each speech signal contains information across multiple frequencies which, when charted on a spectrogram, tend to form bands known as formants. Initial attempts to understand speech percep...
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What distinguishes sound waves from most other waves is that humans easily can perceive the frequency and amplitude of the wave. The frequency governs the pitch of the note produced, while the amplitude relates to the sound le...
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