Chapter 2
Linguistic Processing
Three ways to perceiving speech
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1. Articulatory causes
2. Psychoacoustic effects
Frequency: the movement of sound
Tone: identifying particular speakers
Duration: between sounds and syllables
Intensity: detecting prominences
3. Linguistic intentions
Recognizing words
• The two main tasks of the listener in word
recognition are identification of words and
activating knowledge of word meanings.
• Possible situation
• 1. Knowing the sound….don’t know the
meaning
• 2. Knowing the sound….know the
meaning immediately
• Look at the bottom of page 20
• Does the action of listening stop because
of the unrecognizing words?
• Yes? No?
• Segmentation: refers to the problem of locating
word boundaries in a continuous signal in which
physical cues are rarely present.
• 1. stressed syllables
• Variation: refers to the problem of recognizing
words that are characterized by sloppy
articulation, so that words must often be
recognized from partial acoustic information.
• 1.prototype of particular sounds—allophonic
variation
Logogen model (Morton,1969)
• Logogen: each logogen has a ‘resting level’ of
activity, a level which can be increased by
contextual information in the input.
• The threshold is a function of word frequency;
more frequent words have a lower threshold for
recognition.
• Recognizing a word is dependent on its
frequency of occurrence in the individual’s
lexicon.
• One complicating factor: competitors:
words with similar phonological forms.
• Speech, speed, species, peach
Cohort model (Marslen-Wilson,
1984)
• Word recognition basically proceeds in
sequential fashion
TRACE Model
• McClelland and Elman (1986)
• 1. phonetic feature, phoneme and word
Fuzzy logic model
• Massaro (1994)
• Feature evaluation
• Feature integration:incoming speech
features are continuously evaluated,
integrated and matched against prototype
descriptions in memory
• Decision: an identification decision is
made on the basis of a goodness-of-fit
judgment at all levels.