Course: Speech Perception and Production 2011

Course: Speech Perception and Production 2011


	Course	Speech Perception and Production

	Vakcode	TW85441

	Credits	5 ECTS

	Entry requirements	BA Linguistics or something equivalent

	Period	semester 1, block 1 (September through October 2011)

	Information	Onderwijssecretariaat Taal- en Letterkunde also see IFA teaching also see the page of the study guide

	Part of...	Research Master's in Linguistics Master's in General Linguistics Master's in Artifical Intelligence

	Teacher	Paul Boersma

	Place	BH 302

	Time	Thursday 15:00-17:45 (exact days see below)

	Objectives
	Building on knowledge of acoustic and articulatory phonetics that the student has acquired in earlier BA courses, this course aims at providing insight into and knowledge about how listeners organize their perception of speech, how speakers organize their production of speech, how this organization develops in first and second languages, how this development leads to changes over the generations, and how these changes lead to "emergent universals", i.e. observed facts about what occurs and what does not occur in languages worldwide. The student comes to understand the empirical evidence (from experiments described in the literature), comes to understand theoretical explanations (from reviews published in the literature), and acquires the skill of modelling the phenomena within an explicit theory of multi-level bidirectional phonology and phonetics.

	Contents
	Attention is paid to the following subjects: The acoustic signal and speech perception. Phonetic and psycholinguistic models of speech comprehension. Native versus non-native speech perception and production. L1 and L2 acquisition of speech perception. Explicitly modelling speech perception: categorization, the Ganong effect, the McGurk effect, sequential abstraction. Explicitly modelling the acquisition of speech perception: cue weighting, the perceptual magnet effect. Explicitly modelling the use of perceptual learning results in production: the /i/ prototype effect, enhancement, articulatory constraints. Explicitly modelling the evolution of sound systems over the generations: dispersion, the compatibility of innocent misapprehension with apparent teleology. Explicitly modelling the emergence of universal typologies: markedness, licensing by cue.

	Format
	lectures and practical sessions

	Study materials
	We assume you already have prior knowledge of acoustic and articulatory phonetics, such as that provided by Peter Ladefoged's book Vowels and consonants. If not, you should buy that book and read it in the first week. At the end of each lecture, we provide you with an article from the literature on phonetic or psycholinguistic experiments, and/or with an article by ourselves that attempts to model the underlying mechanism of those experiments within our multi-level Optimality-Theoretic framework of bidirectional phonology and phonetics.

	Cost
	about €15 for printing the articles

	Language
	English

Assessment:

Your grade will be a weighted average of your grades for: graded home assignments (57 percent), a small written examination on acoustic phonetics (12 percent), a test on producing some sounds (3 percent), and a test in week 8 (28 percent).

Time schedule:

Each of the seven lectures lasts 2.5 hours (plus break). Your homework may cost you about 11 hours a week; this is also true of the homework you receive in the seventh week, on which the final test (in week 8) will be based. This course will therefore cost you about 13.5 hours a week (a third of your time), which makes a total of approximately 105 hours, at least if you succeed on the first try.

Preliminary study guide per lecture

A typical lecture is divided into three hours:

first hour: discussing your home assignments, which therefore usually includes discussing some phonetics (perception and production), discussing an article (about questions raised by the title, questions answered by the paper, and questions that come up when you read the article), and theoretically modelling the results of that article;
second hour and third hour: presentation of background information (often a real conference talk, and/or a demo), giving you enough knowledge for your home assignment, which usually consists of doing some hands-on phonetics, reading the next lecture's paper, and modelling the results of that paper.

In some lectures there could be a test.

The homework is handed in no later than the night before the day before the next lecture, that is about 36 hours before the next lecture. Regarding the work that the teacher has to do, this deadline is an unnegotiable condition.

Lecture 1 Sept. 8 2011	Models of phonological and phonetic comprehension and production; cross-language perception First hour: gaps in your knowledge of speech production, transcription, speech perception, and the ear. Second hour: one model of bidirectional phonology and phonetics. Third hour: application to a simple case from Polivanov (1931), namely tak, to explain how to do OT modelling of perception. Homework: 1. your own static spectral auditory forms. 2. read Polivanov (1931): The subjective nature of the perceptions of language sounds. 3. model Polivanov's case of Japanese cross-language perception of the Russian word drama.
Lecture 2 Sept. 15 2011	Serial, parallel, and interactive comprehension: the Ganong effect First hour: discussion of assignments 1-3. Second hour: background to reading McQueen & Cutler (1997): voice onset time, perception tasks in the laboratory. Third hour: presentation on the Ganong effect. Homework: 4. your own voice onset time. 5. read McQueen & Cutler (1997): Cognitive processes in speech perception. 6. model the Ganong effect in sequential and parallel OT.
Lecture 3 Sept. 22 2011	Perceiving vowel spaces First hour: discussion of assignments 4-6. Second hour: presentation on Peterson & Barney (1952: Control methods used in a study of vowels) Third hour: some technical background terms used by that article (dB, mel, standard deviation, statistical significance, analysis of variance). Homework: 7. plot Peterson & Barney's three vowel spaces. 8. plot your own /a-e-i-o-u/ vowel space. 9. devise a cue constraint ranking for your vowels /a-e-i-o-u/.
Lecture 4 Sept. 29 2011	Lexicon-driven learning of perception; the McGurk effect First hour: discussion of assignments 7-9, including a test on vowels (waveforms, spectrograms, formants, excitation patterns), and on Peterson & Barney's technical background terms (12 percent). Second hour: presentation of Escudero & Boersma's (2001) talk in Philadelphia, on our modelling of the acquisition of cue weighting. Third hour: presentation (and demo) on the McGurk effect and on bidirectionalism. Homework: 10. measure your /a-e-i-o-u/ perception grammar. 11. read Escudero & Boersma (2001/2003): Modelling the perceptual development of phonological contrasts with Optimality Theory and the Gradual Learning Algorithm. 12. ejectives: produce them (3 percent) and order their six gestures. 13. read Boersma (2011): A constraint-based explanation of the McGurk effect.
Lecture 5 Oct. 6 2011	The perceptual magnet effect: prototypes or perceptual warping? First hour: discussion of assignments 10-13. Second hour: presentation on perceptual magnets, prototypes, and perceptual warping. Third hour: presentation of Boersma/Escudero/Hayes talk at GALA, Utrecht 2003. Homework: 14. read Kuhl (1991): Human adults and human infants show a "perceptual magnet effect" for the prototypes of speech categories, monkeys do not. 15. constraints for the perceptual magnet effect or perceptual warping. 16. read Boersma, Escudero & Hayes (2003): Learning abstract phonological from auditory phonetic categories: an integrated model for the acquisition of language-specific sound categories. 17. improve Boersma, Escudero & Hayes (2003).
Lecture 6 Oct. 13 2011	Using the same constraints for perception and production: the prototype effect First hour: discussion of assignments 14-17. Second hour: presentation on the prototype effect. Third hour: presentation of Boersma's talk on vowel dispersion at GLOW, Tromsø 2007. Homework: 18. read Johnson, Flemming & Wright (1993): The hyperspace effect: phonetic targets are hyperarticulated. 19. read Boersma & Hamann (2008): The evolution of auditory dispersion in bidirectional constraint grammars.
Lecture 7 Oct. 20 2011	Using the same constraints for perception and production: markedness and licensing by cue First hour: discussion of assignments 18-19. Second hour: presentation on the phonology of markedness. Third hour: presentation on the phonology of licensing by cue. Homework: 20. read Liberman, Harris, Hoffman & Griffith (1957): The discrimination of speech sounds within and across phoneme boundaries. 21. read Boersma & Hamann (2009): Loanword adaptation as first-language phonological perception.
Final test Oct. 26 2011 15:00-17:00 BH 302	Final test Two hours: a test on homework 20 and 21.

Go to IFA home page
This page is: http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/paul/percprod/, by Paul Boersma, 6 October 2011