PSYC 3290 Chapter Notes -Acoustic Phonetics, Articulatory Phonetics, Parallel Communication

• School: York University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 3290
• Professor: Raluca Barac

Document Summary

The study of speech sounds is called phonetics: articulatory phonetics refers to the study of how speech sounds are produced, acoustic phonetics refers to the study of the resulting speech sounds. Speech exhibits characteristics not found in other forms of auditory perception. The phenomenon of categorical perception suggests that speech is a special mode of perception. Perception of speech is influenced by the contexts in which it appears: we use top-down processing to identify some sounds in context. Visual perception of language is achieved through a succession of processing levels: perception of letters in a word context is superior to perception of isolated or unrelated letters. Recent models of the perception of language assume that we process information at multiple levels in an interactive way: these models can account for several findings in speech perception and visual word perception. The analysis of language comprehension can be divided into 4 levels: phonological (focus of this chapter, lexical, syntactic, discourse.