#speech perception

[from-my-linguistics-textbook]

i, too, ask myself this every day.

Speech Perception by the Chinchilla: Voiced-Voiceless Distinction in Alveolar Plosive Consonants by Patricia K. Kuhl, James D. Miller

[sun-cheyne]

Neural 'Auto-Correct' Feature We Use to Process Ambiguous Sounds Discovered

Researchers report the brain re-evaluates the interpretation of speech sounds the moment subsequent sounds are heard in order to update interpretations as necessary.

Our brains have an “auto-correct” feature that we deploy when re-interpreting ambiguous sounds, a team of scientists has discovered. Its findings, which appear in the Journal of Neuroscience, point to new ways we use information and context to aid in speech comprehension.

“What a person thinks they hear does not always match the actual signals that reach the ear,” explains Laura Gwilliams, a doctoral candidate in NYU’s Department of Psychology, a researcher at the Neuroscience of Language Lab at NYU Abu Dhabi, and the paper’s lead author. “This is because, our results suggest, the brain re-evaluates the interpretation of a speech sound at the moment that each subsequent speech sound is heard in order to update interpretations as necessary.

“Remarkably, our hearing can be affected by context occurring up to one second later, without the listener ever being aware of this altered perception.”

“For example, an ambiguous initial sound, such as ‘b’ and ‘p,’ is heard one way or another depending on if it occurs in the word ‘parakeet’ or ‘barricade,’ ” adds Alec Marantz, principal investigator of the project, a professor in NYU’s departments of Linguistics and Psychology, and co-director of NYU Abu Dhabi’s Neuroscience of Language Lab, where the research was conducted. “This happens without conscious awareness of the ambiguity, even though the disambiguating information doesn’t come until the middle of the third syllable.” (Full Story)

[phonaesthemes]

Fourteen-month-olds’ sensitivity to acoustic salience in minimal pair word learning - Volume 45 Issue 5 - Stephanie L. ARCHER, Suzanne CURTIN

During the first two years of life, infants concurrently refine native-language speech categories and word learning skills. However, in the Switch Task, 14-month-olds do not detect minimal contrasts in a novel object–word pairing (Stager & Werker, 1997). We investigate whether presenting infants with acoustically salient contrasts (liquids) facilitates success in the Switch Task. The first two experiments demonstrate that acoustic differences boost infants’ detection of contrasts. However, infants cannot detect the contrast when the segments are digitally shortened. Thus, not all minimal contrasts are equally difficult, and the acoustic properties of a contrast matter in word learning.

[mikhailnm-blog]

Speech perception main features & definition - allperception.info

Speech perception is its recognition. Moreover, speech perception exists only in a mandatory combination of two fundamental aspects.

Speech perception is its recognition. Moreover, speech is perceiving only in a mandatory combination of two aspects. Firstly, as a hearing stimulus, secondly, as a source of the semantic content of perceiving sounds. The first aspect is realizing by the auditory or visual system (depending on the form of speech – voice or written).