1. Speech perception.

a) What is the lack of invariance problem?

The lack of invariance problem is the problem that the same (intended)
sound is produced very differently by different speakers on different
occasions and embedded in different words. For example, sounds can be
affected by phonetic context (coarticulation), syllabic stress, prosody &
intonation, speaking rate, emotional state, and other factors. The lack of
invariance problem therefore constitutes a significant challenge to speech
perception.
b) Give an example of the Ganong effect.
There are many possible examples. Here is one: hearing a phoneme that is
ambiguous between /d/ and /t/ as /t/ when followed by “ask” but as /d/
when followed by “ash”.
c) Give an example of the McGurk effect.
There are many possible examples. Here is one: hearing a sound as /da/
when the acoustic signal indicates it’s a /ba/ and the visual signal (from the
lips) indicates it’s a /ga/.
d) The Ganong effect and the McGurk effect both demonstrate that a particular
type of non-acoustic information is integrated with the acoustic signal to yield a
percept of a sound. For each effect, what is the non-information that is
recruited, and how does this information help overcome the lack of invariance
problem?
Ganong effect: top-down information (knowledge of words) is integrated
with the ambiguous acoustic signal.
McGurk effect: bottom-up information (visual signal) is integrated with the
acoustic signal.
In the Ganong effect, lexical information helps overcome the uncertainty
about the in principle noisy/ambiguous acoustic signal.
The McGurk effect demonstrates that visual information can modulate even
a fairly unambiguous acoustic signal, suggesting an important role for
visual information in guiding speech perception under noisy conditions.

2. Word representation. Come up with new words, not ones used in class.
In semantic priming, a word like a)____bread_____ primes a word like
b)___jam____. (Give one example each.) This means that in a lexical decision
task, the word in b) will be responded to more c)____quickly_____ when it
occurs after the word in a) than when it occurs after an unrelated word like
d)_____lamp______. In contrast, if the word in b) occurs after a word that is
phonologically similar to it, like e)______jazz______, it will be responded to more
f)_____slowly______, as the result of a process known as
g)______phonological_______ _____inhibition______. Mediated semantic
priming is the process whereby the word in a) primes a word like
h)_____raspberry______, which is i)___semantically____ related to the word in
b).

3. Word recognition.

a) In the figure, longer eye fixation on the parrot compared to the nickel at the
prompt "Pick up the carrot" is called a
i. rhyme competitor effect.
ii. cohort competitor effect.
b) The effect is best explained by the
i. cohort model.
ii. TRACE model.
c) Explain your choice in b). How does the model you selected account for the
effect? Why does the other model not account for it?

The cohort model does not account for rhyme competitor effects because
it assumes that any word that does not share its phonological onset with
the target word is not activated as the target word unfolds. The TRACE
model accounts for the effect by allowing low-level acoustic input to
probabilistically affect word recognition by activating phonemes
compatible with the input, which in turn activate lexical items containing
those phonemes. This allows words to be activated if they share a lot of
phonemes with the target word, even if they don’t share the onset.