PSY 260 Lecture Notes - Lecture 24: Voice-Onset Time, Vocal Folds, Phoneme
Document Summary
The segmentation problem: speech is continuous, not segmented. Lab of invariance problem: context-induced variation, variation due to differing speech conditions, variation due to different speaker identity. During perception information is categorized: the input to perception is continuous, but the output is categorical, voicing: when vocal folds vibrate. /g/ and /k/ differ in voice onset time with /g/ early and /k/ late. People perceive sounds that vary continuously as suddenly in a different category. Adults are impaired in recognizing phonemes that don"t exist in their own language: this makes it hard to learn other languages as adults, you will also never speak the language like a native speaker. Because you can"t recognize all the phonemes, you literally can"t tell when you are mispronouncing words. Phoneme recognition: just as visual object recognition is made difficult by noisy inputs, so too is the recognition of phonemes in speech: and just as top-down context assists visual object recognition, context also helps phoneme recognition.
