SPPA 601: Speech Science
Study Guide for Exam 1
Notes: This study guide is intended to give you a general idea of some of the topics that might be
covered on the exam, and to help you organize your studying. It is not intended to cover all of the
topics that might be appear on the exam. In addition to the kinds of questions that are shown below,
there may also be multiple choice questions, matching items, and diagrams that you would be asked
to label.
1. List and briefly explain the four kinds of information that are conveyed by a speech signal.
2. List and briefly explain (using examples where you think they’d help) the Six Tough Problems
that were encountered by Franklin Cooper and other early speech researchers who were
attempting to understand the speech code.
3. What was the big problem with the original Haskins Labs reading machine and what did this
have to do with the decision of the Haskins team to take a break from the reading machine to
study speech?
4. It’s pretty obvious why the speech analysis capabilities of the sound spectrograph machine
would be very helpful in trying to understand how the speech code works. What capability did
the Pattern Playback machine provide and why did speech researchers find this machine to be
so useful?
5. Give an example to illustrate what is meant by the context sensitivity or invariance problem.
6. What do speech and Morse code have in common? What kinds of problems need to be solved
in order to crack either code?
7. What does it mean to say that different layers of the language hierarchy are distinct or
autonomous? Give examples that demonstrate the autonomy of: (a) syntax and semantics, (b)
phonetics and phonology, and (c) semantics and pragmatics.
8. Give an example to show what is meant by a recursive tree structure.
9. Explain the basic processes that are involved in the propagation of a sound wave. Begin your
explanation with a vibrating object and end at the tympanic membrane of a listener.
10. What is a spring and mass system and what rules control the natural vibrating frequency of a
spring and mass system? Why do we bother learning about springs and masses since there’s
pretty much nothing in the speech or hearing system that remotely resembles a spring-mass
combination?
11. Draw time- and frequency-domain representations of simple periodic, complex periodic,
complex aperiodic/noise, and complex aperiodic/transient sounds.
12. Draw time- and frequency-domain representations of: (a) two sounds with the same
fundamental frequency and different spectrum envelopes, and (b) two sounds with the same
spectrum envelope and different fundamental frequencies.
13. A complex periodic signal has a fundamental period of 2 msec. What is the fundamental
frequency of the signal? If we examine the spectrum below 2,700 Hz, at what frequencies
would we expect to find harmonics?
14. Give an example of the following kinds of graphs, being sure to label both axes:
a.
b.
c.
d.
e.
amplitude spectrum
phase spectrum
frequency-response curve
time-domain representation
frequency-domain representation
15. What is a frequency response curve and how is it different from an amplitude spectrum?
16. In what way does a pair of tinted sunglasses behave like a filter?
17. Give a brief explanation of the basic idea behind Fourier analysis.
18. Draw and label frequency-response curves for low-pass, high-pass, band-pass and band-reject
filters.
19. Show the frequency response curve for a 35 cm uniform tube that is closed at one end only.
20. The peaks that are found in a frequency response curve such as the one in the question above
are:
a.
b.
c.
d.
e.
f.
g.
h.
i.
j.
formants
natural vibrating frequencies
fundamental frequencies
one fundamental frequency and some number of harmonics
one fundamental frequency and some number of overtones
one fundamental frequency and some number of harmonics
one fundamental frequency and some number of octaves
one fundamental frequency and some number of formants
resonances
harmonics
21. Draw a narrow- and wide-band spectrograms of a sustained vowel. Which of these
spectrograms are best for seeing the formant frequency patterns of the vowel? How would you
measure fundamental frequency from the narrow-band spectrogram? How would you measure
fundamental frequency from the wide-band spectrogram?