BRAIN & COGNITION WEEK 9- speech production and speech perception
SPEECH PRODUCTION
‘Suprasegmental’ features of speech (prosody)
- Intonation, stress/accent, tone, pauses, rate, duration
Phonemes as the basic building blocks
PROSODY refers to suprasegmental speech properties… as above. One way to appreciate prosody is
to listen to sentences where the prosody is not quite right e.g. individual durations of certain words
are not what is expected.
INTONATION is a change in pitch over time e.g. falling in pitch = statement, rising in pitch = question.
STRESS conveys lexical information- stress or accent refers to the length, loudness or pitch of a
syllable. E.g. record an album then release the record…
TONE or accentual language e.g. Japanese, certain syllables are accented or unaccented- and this
changes the meaning of the word. Tone language e.g. mandarin, each syllable is lexically marked
with one of four lexical tones which all have distinctive pitch contours – altering the pitch contour
may change the lexical meaning of a word and sentence.
PAUSE- normal speech has no pause between words- it flows. Strong ‘stress’ signal ‘don’t… do that…
again!’ – alters meaning
RATE- rate is the average number of speech segments per unit time (average 4 syllables per sec)- a
faster rate may signal anxiety, slower rate may signal depression.
DURATION- relative duration of segments important semantic cue, key words tend to be
pronounced carefully, fillers are not. E.g. ‘this is actually true’ vs ‘this is true, actually’.
PHONEMES- are distinctive sounds in a language that permit contrasts- e.g. minimal pairs – RAT,
HAT, PAT… if you change the phoneme, you change the word. BUT these are abstract
representations- categories, NOT sounds- phones.
PHONES & ALLOPHONES- actual sounds are called phones e.g. pin, spin. If you say spin like ‘sbin’ the
two sounds are different (allophones) but swapping them doesn’t make it a different word
Conversely a particular MORPHEME (unit of written language) can be pronounced differently
depending on the speech
HOW ARE CONSONANTS PRODUCED***
3 TYPES OF ARTICULATION
- Bilabial- using both lips
- Labiodental- lip against teeth
- Interdental- between the teeth
Partial obstruction causes turbulence- FRICATIVES- airflow partially stopped to produce a rushing
sound e.g. the ‘fr’ in fricative.
SPEECH PRODUCTION
‘Suprasegmental’ features of speech (prosody)
- Intonation, stress/accent, tone, pauses, rate, duration
Phonemes as the basic building blocks
PROSODY refers to suprasegmental speech properties… as above. One way to appreciate prosody is
to listen to sentences where the prosody is not quite right e.g. individual durations of certain words
are not what is expected.
INTONATION is a change in pitch over time e.g. falling in pitch = statement, rising in pitch = question.
STRESS conveys lexical information- stress or accent refers to the length, loudness or pitch of a
syllable. E.g. record an album then release the record…
TONE or accentual language e.g. Japanese, certain syllables are accented or unaccented- and this
changes the meaning of the word. Tone language e.g. mandarin, each syllable is lexically marked
with one of four lexical tones which all have distinctive pitch contours – altering the pitch contour
may change the lexical meaning of a word and sentence.
PAUSE- normal speech has no pause between words- it flows. Strong ‘stress’ signal ‘don’t… do that…
again!’ – alters meaning
RATE- rate is the average number of speech segments per unit time (average 4 syllables per sec)- a
faster rate may signal anxiety, slower rate may signal depression.
DURATION- relative duration of segments important semantic cue, key words tend to be
pronounced carefully, fillers are not. E.g. ‘this is actually true’ vs ‘this is true, actually’.
PHONEMES- are distinctive sounds in a language that permit contrasts- e.g. minimal pairs – RAT,
HAT, PAT… if you change the phoneme, you change the word. BUT these are abstract
representations- categories, NOT sounds- phones.
PHONES & ALLOPHONES- actual sounds are called phones e.g. pin, spin. If you say spin like ‘sbin’ the
two sounds are different (allophones) but swapping them doesn’t make it a different word
Conversely a particular MORPHEME (unit of written language) can be pronounced differently
depending on the speech
HOW ARE CONSONANTS PRODUCED***
3 TYPES OF ARTICULATION
- Bilabial- using both lips
- Labiodental- lip against teeth
- Interdental- between the teeth
Partial obstruction causes turbulence- FRICATIVES- airflow partially stopped to produce a rushing
sound e.g. the ‘fr’ in fricative.
