The Building Blocks
This is the basic unit of spoken language, such as the sounds 'a', 'k', or 'th'.
What is a phoneme?
This effect occurs when a cough or noise replaces a phoneme in a sentence, yet listeners "fill in" the missing sound based on context.
What is the phonemic restoration effect?
This famous illusion occurs when visual information (mouth movements) conflicts with auditory information, resulting in a "compromise" sound.
What is the McGurk Effect?
This general approach suggests that we recognize objects and speech by breaking them down into small, distinct components.
What is feature analysis?
This common problem occurs when background noise makes it difficult to focus on a single speaker.
What is the cocktail party effect?
This term describes the phenomenon where we perceive a "clear-cut" sound (like 'b' vs 'p') even when the physical signal is on a continuous gradient.
What is categorical perception?
While bottom-up processing deals with the physical sound, this type of processing uses our knowledge of language and the world to interpret speech.
What is top-down processing?
If you see a person's mouth saying "ga" but hear the sound "ba," your brain might perceive this third sound.
What is "da"?
This theory argues that humans have a "special" innate mechanism specifically designed for processing speech, distinct from other sounds.
What is the Special Mechanism Approach (or Speech-is-Special)?
This term describes a condition where an individual has difficulty recognizing or producing speech, often due to brain damage.
What is aphasia?
This characteristic of speech refers to the fact that when we speak, we don't produce one phoneme at a time; instead, the mouth prepares for the next sound while still producing the current one.
What is coarticulation?
This specific phenomenon shows that we recognize a word faster if it appears in a meaningful sentence rather than in a random list.
What is the word superiority effect (or word-in-sentence effect)?
This part of the brain is often cited as the location where auditory and visual speech information is integrated.
What is the Superior Temporal Sulcus (STS)?
In contrast to the special mechanism approach, this theory suggests we perceive speech using the same general system we use for all other auditory stimuli.
What is the General Mechanism Approach?
This is the term for the "melody" or rhythm of speech, which can convey emotion and meaning beyond the words themselves.
What is prosody?
Because different speakers have different pitches and accents, this term describes the challenge of perceiving the same phoneme despite physical differences in the signal.
What is speaker variability?
This is the specific term for the mental dictionary where we store information about the sounds and meanings of words.
What is the mental lexicon?
Research shows that people are much better at understanding speech in a noisy room if they can see this part of the speaker.
What is the speaker’s mouth/face?
This term refers to the "boundaries" we create to separate words in a continuous stream of speech, a task that is difficult for non-native speakers.
What is word boundary (or speech segmentation)?
This type of "processing" happens when you are so familiar with a language that you perceive word boundaries automatically, even if they aren't physically there.
What is automatic processing?
Speech is remarkably fast, often reaching this many phonemes per second, highlighting the efficiency of our perceptual system.
What is 10 to 15 phonemes per second?
Warren and Warren’s classic 1970 study used this specific experimental manipulation to prove that we use the end of a sentence to interpret a sound from the middle.
What is a "spliced" or "replaced" phoneme (the 'heel' vs 'peel' vs 'wheel' study)?
This term describes the general theory that we perceive speech not just as sound, but as the motor movements required to produce it.
What is the Motor Theory of Speech Perception?
This specific finding (that non-human animals can also show categorical perception) is often used as evidence for this specific theory.
What is the General Mechanism Approach?
This "effect" explains why it's easier to hear a difference between two phonemes that belong to different categories than two that belong to the same category.
What is the phoneme-boundary effect?