UALL 2004

PSYCHOLINGUISTICS

Lecture 6

The Biological Foundations of Language (Part II)

1
 Learning Outcomes
At the end of this lecture, students will be able to:-
• Describe the process by which speech sounds
are produced.
• Understand how and where sounds are
produced within our vocal tract.
• Determine acoustics cue and categorical
perception.
• Explain the bottom-up and top-down language
processing.
• Explain models of speech perception.
2
How is speech produced?
• There are three major systems for
speech production:
– The vocal tract
– The larynx
– The subglottal system
• Movements in these three systems
are coordinated during the
production of speech sounds.

3
Human Vocal Tract
 How is speech produced? (Cont.)

• There are two classes of speech sounds: vowels and

consonants.
• The major difference is that consonants are produced
with more articulatory movements and more
constriction than vowels.
• One of the most common and basic systems is to
classify sounds by;
– where in the vocal tract they are made (place of
articulation - POA)
– how they are made (manner of production - MOP)

5
Place of Articulation (POA)

6
 Manner of Production (MOP)
• The air flowing from the
lungs to the lips is called
the air stream.
Stops • During speech production,
some parts of the vocal
Fricative tract constrict to a degree
Glides s sufficient to impede the
flow of air.
• The manner in which the
Liquids Affricates constrictions are made in
the vocal tract affects the
air stream and results in
Nasals different ways in which
speech sounds can be
produced.

7
Summary: Place & Manner
 Acoustic Properties of Speech Sounds
• Acoustic is concerned with the physics of sounds.

• Acoustic information about sounds can be depicted in : -

• Sound spectrogram – shows the amount of energy
present in a sound – the peaks of energy at
particular frequencies are called formants – all
vowels and consonants have formants

• Two words in a language that differ by just one sound

are called minimal pair. Examples are “dog” and “cog”,
“bat” and “pat”, “fog” and “fop”

Sound Spectrogram 9
 Acoustic Properties of Speech
Sounds
• In some languages, such as English, printed letters do
not always correspond to specific sounds.

• The letter “o” represents a number of different sounds

(mock, moon and mow)

• The sound “ee” can be spelled by an “i” or an “y”.

• It is convenient to have a system of representing

individual sounds with specific symbols. : International
Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)
 Vowels Consonants
• Made with a relatively free • Different features are
flow of air. necessary to describe
• Determined by the way in consonants.
which the shape of the • Criteria for describing
tongue modifies the consonants
airflow. – Voicing
• 2 types of vowels sounds – Place of articulation
(monophthongs and – Manner of production
diphthongs)
• Criteria for describing
vowels
– Heights
– Backness
– Roundedness

V.DEEPA (201901) 11
 Perception of Phonetic Segments
• One of the most important goals of research in
this area has been to isolate specific aspects of
the complex sound pattern necessary for the
identity of a given phoneme.

• These critical parts of complex sound pattern

are called acoustic cues.

• This cues are not perceived along a continuum

but a fixed category.
12
 Perception of Phonetic Segments
• Researchers required certain equipment
(speech analysis machine – sound
spectrograph) and also the capacity to
synthesize speech according to precise
specification before they could begin to work in
this area.

• The main aim was to create speech stimuli that

could be used to evaluate the perceptual
relevance of acoustic cues.
 Perception of Vowels

• There are ways in which speech perception is

tested.
– Two tasks: discrimination and identification
1. Discrimination tasks require the listener
to indicate whether 2 stimuli are the same
or different.
2. Identification tasks require the listener to
label or determine the identity of the
stimulus.
14
 Voice-Onset-Time (VOT): An
important Acoustic Cue
• a feature of the production of stop consonants

• defined as the length of time that passes between the

release of a stop consonant and the onset of voicing, the
vibration of the vocal folds, or, according to other
authors, periodicity.

• Best measure for signaling the difference between

voiced and voiceless stop consonants in syllables such
as [ba] versus [pa].

15
 Voice-Onset-Time (VOT): An
important Acoustic Cue

• In other words, if VOT is longer than 30 msec, we hear

[ba], it is shorter, then we hear [pa]. So, the VOT value of
30 msec serves as a key factor of some sort of acoustic
cue.
 Categorical perception

• Categorical perception - perceiving things that

lie along a continuum as belonging to one
distinct category or another.

• Phonemes may be pronounced differently but

we rarely notice the differences.

• Categorically different - classify sounds as one

phoneme or another (phonetic categories
(voiced/voiceless, manner of articulation)

17
 Categorical perception
• Categorically identify if the sound is [p] or [b].

• When we hear speech we have to determine if the sound

belongs to one or another category of speech sound.

• We classify speech sounds as one phoneme or another,

there is no in between sound.

• This is known as categorical perception.

 Language Processing and Linguistics
Lexical and Syntactic Factors in Word Perception

• Words produced in conversational speech are less

intelligible than isolated words because in fluent speech
we pronounce words less precisely than in citation form.

• Top-down processing – the use of semantic and

syntactic information as well as phonological.

• Bottom-up processing – using only acoustic information

to decode the speech signal.

19
 Language Processing and Linguistics

• Language processing shows evidence that features,

phonemes, and syllable structure capture some aspects
of the way in which we process language.

• But speech perception is a complex activity that involves

much more than these phonetics and phonological
representation.
 Language Processing and Linguistics

• Example : Consider what might occur when you hear the

sentence “The dog bit the cat”.

• Language processing involves the interplay of

information that develops simultaneously at many
different levels of analysis.
 Language Processing and Linguistics

• Phonetic analysis to isolate phonemes and word

boundaries, and to relate these to representation in the
mental lexicon (inductive analysis – bottom-up
processing)

• Spontaneous and automatic interpretation of a sentence

on the basis of whatever information is available to us.
We are not only recognizing it using bottom-up
processing, we are also employing a set of expectations
to guide phonetic processing and word recognition. (top
– down processing)

22
 Models of Speech Perception
Bottom-up view Bottom-up and top-down view
• Main concern is the perception
• Main concern is word
of phonetic segments.
recognition.
• Process of perception rising
• The joint operation of multiple
through stages from the
sources of information,
auditory input, to a
including bottom-up and top-
phonological level, and up to
down information, are called
word identification.
information processing.
• Models:
• Models:
– Motor Theory of Speech
– Cohort Model
Perception
– TRACE Model
– Analysis-by-Synthesis
• In these models, the end result
• In these models, the end
is a meaningful utterance
results of sound identification
rather than a meaningless
are achieved without
syllable.
reference to meaning or
syntax.
23
 Motor Theory of Speech Perception
(Liberman, Cooper, Shankweiler, & Studdert-Kennedy, 1967; Liberman, 1970)

• Speech is a special type of auditory stimulus for human

being; when we are exposed to it, we shift automatically
to the speech mode, which uses different processes and
criteria to evaluate speech.

• Speech signal are interpreted by reference to motor

speech movements.

• Links the processes of speech production with speech

perception.

24
Motor Theory of Speech Perception
 Analysis-by-Synthesis
(Stevens, 1960; Stevens & Halle, 1967)

• Similar to motor theory in that speech perception and

production are closely tied.

• We make use of an abstract distinctive features

matrix in a system of matching that is crucial to the
speech perception process.

• Listeners perceive (analyze) speech by implicitly

generating (synthesizing) speech from what they have
heard and then compare the “synthesized” speech with
the auditory stimulus.

26
 Analysis of acoustic The auditory patterns are
features of the speech tentatively decoded into
signal distinctive features

This message forms the

A hypothesis concerning input to a set of
the distinctive feature generative rules that
representation of the synthesize candidate
utterances is formed. patterns (neuroacoustical
level)

The results of this match

are sent to a control
component that transfers
the phonetic description
to higher stages of
linguistic analysis.

27