COMD 5070 Review Questions with Correct
Answers
Affective prosody - ✅✅ Expressive of emotional state (child-directed speech)
Linguistic prosody - ✅✅ Expressive of grammar and meaning (pitch/pause-
based)
Forward/anticipatory coarticulation - ✅✅ 'spoon' - lip rounding before the 's'
Backward/retentive coarticulation - ✅✅ 'no' - 'o' is nasalized
Acoustic features of stressed speech - ✅✅ Loudness
Duration
Fundamental frequency/tone
How does relaxed vs. Clear speech differ? - ✅✅ Most phonemes get longer in
duration, stops tend to be released, there is less articulatory undershoot for clear
speech.
Hypernasality - ✅✅ vowel distortion - nasal and oral cavities are linked
Nasal cavities act as an antiresonance
Formants substantially damped
Nasal air flow - ✅✅ Should be low for vowels
Should be near zero for pressure consonants
Flow during oral consonants indicates leakage
What instrument measures nasalance? - ✅✅ Acoustic nasometer - compares the
intensity levels of sound/ air flow reaching the upper versus the lower microphone
Acoustic nasometry - ✅✅ Useful in clinical assessment
Provides biofeedback signal during speech
Electromyography (EMG) - ✅✅ Reveals muscle activation
Uncomfortable, even painful for the velum
, Intramuscular electrodes used for - ✅✅ Fine detail
Surface electrodes used for - ✅✅ Overall activity measures of larger muscles
EMG signal processing techniques - ✅✅ Rectification - all neg. Values made
pos. So that we can do further signal processing averaging based on all positive
units, rather than letting the negative ones cancel them out
Smoothing - low pass filter
Averaging - across repetitions of the same behavior
Palatometer - ✅✅ has to do with the sounds that entail the contact of the tongue
with the palate. This is true of several of the vowels and many of the consonants.
Sounds that won't be visible with a palatometer - ✅✅ Sounds like /h/, /m/, /a/,
and several others don't require tongue contact
Limitations of the palatometer - ✅✅ Device only shows tongue contact patterns,
motor equivalence (articulators can make similar sounds)
Magnetic tracking (articulator movements) - ✅✅ strong permanent magnet
Sensitive electronic field detectors
Attach magnet to teeth
Track jaw movements in 3-D space
Recent experiments with tongue tracking
Bilingual speakers - slower tongue movements when speaking English
4 features of the scientific method - ✅✅ Empirical: based on data
Deterministic: Obeys physical laws, things are not random
Predictive
Parsimonious: Use simplest explanation but no simpler
How many semitones in an octave? - ✅✅ 12
What is the Nyquist frequency? - ✅✅ Half the sample rate
The highest frequency the recording is able to reproduce
High pass filter - ✅✅ Allows high frequencies through
Low pass filter - ✅✅ Allows low frequencies through
Answers
Affective prosody - ✅✅ Expressive of emotional state (child-directed speech)
Linguistic prosody - ✅✅ Expressive of grammar and meaning (pitch/pause-
based)
Forward/anticipatory coarticulation - ✅✅ 'spoon' - lip rounding before the 's'
Backward/retentive coarticulation - ✅✅ 'no' - 'o' is nasalized
Acoustic features of stressed speech - ✅✅ Loudness
Duration
Fundamental frequency/tone
How does relaxed vs. Clear speech differ? - ✅✅ Most phonemes get longer in
duration, stops tend to be released, there is less articulatory undershoot for clear
speech.
Hypernasality - ✅✅ vowel distortion - nasal and oral cavities are linked
Nasal cavities act as an antiresonance
Formants substantially damped
Nasal air flow - ✅✅ Should be low for vowels
Should be near zero for pressure consonants
Flow during oral consonants indicates leakage
What instrument measures nasalance? - ✅✅ Acoustic nasometer - compares the
intensity levels of sound/ air flow reaching the upper versus the lower microphone
Acoustic nasometry - ✅✅ Useful in clinical assessment
Provides biofeedback signal during speech
Electromyography (EMG) - ✅✅ Reveals muscle activation
Uncomfortable, even painful for the velum
, Intramuscular electrodes used for - ✅✅ Fine detail
Surface electrodes used for - ✅✅ Overall activity measures of larger muscles
EMG signal processing techniques - ✅✅ Rectification - all neg. Values made
pos. So that we can do further signal processing averaging based on all positive
units, rather than letting the negative ones cancel them out
Smoothing - low pass filter
Averaging - across repetitions of the same behavior
Palatometer - ✅✅ has to do with the sounds that entail the contact of the tongue
with the palate. This is true of several of the vowels and many of the consonants.
Sounds that won't be visible with a palatometer - ✅✅ Sounds like /h/, /m/, /a/,
and several others don't require tongue contact
Limitations of the palatometer - ✅✅ Device only shows tongue contact patterns,
motor equivalence (articulators can make similar sounds)
Magnetic tracking (articulator movements) - ✅✅ strong permanent magnet
Sensitive electronic field detectors
Attach magnet to teeth
Track jaw movements in 3-D space
Recent experiments with tongue tracking
Bilingual speakers - slower tongue movements when speaking English
4 features of the scientific method - ✅✅ Empirical: based on data
Deterministic: Obeys physical laws, things are not random
Predictive
Parsimonious: Use simplest explanation but no simpler
How many semitones in an octave? - ✅✅ 12
What is the Nyquist frequency? - ✅✅ Half the sample rate
The highest frequency the recording is able to reproduce
High pass filter - ✅✅ Allows high frequencies through
Low pass filter - ✅✅ Allows low frequencies through
