MEMORY NONSENSE SYLLABLE

Memory Nonsense Syllable

Memory Nonsense Syllable

Literature Review

There are many different sources of evidence suggesting that there is inter-word competition between candidate words. Listeners in a word-spotting task find it harder to spot words embedded at the beginning of longer words (like sack in [sækraf], the beginning of sacrifice) than in matched sequences that are not word onsets (Diehl, 2006). This effect presumably reflects competition between the shorter and the longer word. Competition also occurs in word spotting when the shorter and the longer word begin at different points (e.g. spotting mess in [dames], the beginning of domestic, is harder than in the nonword onset [names]. Furthermore, the number of competitors beginning at a different point in the signal from the target word influences how easy it is to recognize that target. Recognizing a word embedded in a longer nonsense word is harder when the nonsence word contains a sequence consistent with many other words than when it contains a sequence consistent with fewer other words (Denes, 2007).

One of the most basic characteristics of a human voice is its fundamental frequency (f0), which corresponds to the perceived pitch of the speaker's voice (i.e., whether a person's voice sounds “deep” or “high”). Fundamental frequency is determined by the rate at which the vocal cords vibrate. Speakers have control over modifying the vibration rate while they talk, resulting in transient changes to f0. These changes in f0 can play a major role in the perception of different aspects of speech (Cleary, 2007).. For example, changes to f0 can be used to emphasize one or more words (word stress). As another example, when an English utterance ends with a high pitch, this often signifies a question.

The articulators change the shape of the air stream and the frequency composition of the resulting speech waveform, which forms many of the common speech sounds of our language (e.g., vowels and consonants). The air stream can be wide open (resulting in vowels), redirected partially through the nose (resulting in the nasal consonants m and n), changed in shape over time (resulting in the gliding consonants j, w, and y), or momentarily stopped completely (resulting in the stop consonants b, d, g, p, k, and t). An important acoustical property of stop consonants is voice onset time (VOT), the delay between the burst of sound caused by quickly releasing a set of articulators (such as the lips) and the beginning of vocal fold vibration. For example, producing a syllable like “pah” requires the lips to release a burst of air to produce the /p/, and then a delay until the “ah” sound is made. “Pah” has a relatively long VOT (Andruski, 2006). On the other hand, the syllable “bah,” which involves more or less the same articulations, has a shorter VOT. As these examples illustrate, VOT can serve to distinguish speech sounds from one another. Even though the /b/ and /p/ are produced with the lips in similar ways before the vowel sound is made, it is the ...