PS262 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Two-Streams Hypothesis, Paul Broca, Temporal Lobe
Document Summary
Acoustic signal: the pattern of frequencies and intensities of the sound stimulus. Articulators: structure involved in speech production, such as the tongue, lips, teeth, jaw, and soft palate. Formants: horizontal band of energy in the speech spectrogram associated with vowels. Sound spectrogram: a plot showing the pattern of intensities and frequencies of a speech stimulus. Formant transitions: in the speech stimulus, the rapid shift in frequency that precedes a formant. Phoneme: the shortest segment of speech that, if changed, changes the meaning of a word. For example, the vowel o sounds different in boat and hot, and the vowel e sounds different in head and heed. Phonemes, then, refer not to letters but to speech sounds that determine the meaning of what people say. Coarticulation: the overlapping articulation that occurs when different phonemes follow one another in speech. Because of these effects, the same phoneme can be articulated differently depending on the context in which it appears.
