PERCEPTION OF MUSIC & LANGUAGE

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Music Perception

• Musical notes– Sounds of music extend across frequency

range: 25–4200 Hz

– To increase by one octave double the frequency– Intervals that sound good together have

overlapping harmonic frequencies

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Music Perception

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Music Perception

•Tone height: A sound quality whereby a sound is heard to be of higher or lower pitch; monotonically related to frequency

•Tone chroma: A sound quality shared by tones that have the same octave interval•Musical helix: Can help visualize musical pitch

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Music Perception

• Rhythm: Not just in music– Lots of activities have rhythm: Walking,

waving, finger tapping, heartbeat, breathing, etc.

– More examples: Car, train rides

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Speech Perception

1. Cortical Areas For Speech Perception and Production

2. Phonemes• Articulation • Forment transitions

3. Speech Segmentation4. Intonation & Prosidy

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Broca’s Area & Wernicke’s Area

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Aphasia• Broca's aphasics produce slow, halting speech that is rarely

grammatical. They generally retain their vocabularies and have no difficulty naming objects or performing other meaning-related tasks. In general, they can deduce the meanings of sentences from general knowledge, but cannot understand sentences whose syntax is essential to their meaning.

• Wernicke's aphasics are able to produce generally grammatical sentences, but they are often nonsensical and include invented words. Wernicke's aphasics show few signs of understanding others' speech, and have difficulty naming objects.

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Phonemes - The auditory components of speech

• 43 Phonemes • An alphabet for spoken language -- non-

decomposable• All sounds English words can be built from

a combination of phonemes

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Articulation: Consonants

1 Place of articulation:– Lips: b, p, m– Alveolar ridge: d, t, n– Soft palate: g, k, ng

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Articulation: Consonants

2 Manner of Articulation:– Totally obstructed: b, p, d, t, g, k– Partially obstructed: s, z, f, v, th, sh– Slightly obstructed: l, r, w, y– Initially obstructed: ch, j– Nasals: n, m, ng

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Articulation: Consonants

3 Voicing:– Voiced: b, m ,z, l, r– Voiceless: p, s, ch

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Articulation: VowelsFront Vowels Central Vowelsbeet aboutbit butbaitbet Diphthongsat bite

boyBack Vowels boughbootbookboatcausecot

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Recognizing Phonemes

1 Place ofarticulation:

Front Middle Back

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Recognizing Phonemes

2 Manner ofarticulation:

Obstructed

Unobstructed

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Recognizing Phonemes

3 Voicing:

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Recognizing Phonemes

Vowels

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Recognizing Phonemes

Vowels

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Speech Segmentation• The problem of determining which phonemes are

to be grouped into words before you know what has been said

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Speech Segmentation

• Appears to be largely a function of context, learning common phoneme groupings, common segmentations and familiar phrases

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Speech Segmentation

• Appears to be largely a function of context, learning common phoneme groupings, common segmentations and familiar phrases

• "I owe you a yo-yo". "Mares eat oats and does eat oats, and little lambs eat ivy, a kid'll eat ivy too, wouldn't you?"

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Spectrogram: I owe you a yo-yo

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Speech Segmentation (cont.)

• When speaking with someone who doesn't understand what you just said, or with a young child, we tend to put audible spaces between words in order to assist segmentation

• Many errors of speech perception occur because of improper segmentation - " 'scuse me while I kiss the sky" - or with one phoneme shift -" 'scuse me while I kiss this guy".

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Intonation & Prosidy

• Meaning is carried in intonation "Oh yeah, that course is Great" or "That's it, you're finished”

• Prosidy is not only distinct behaviorally, but neuropsychologically as well

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Language Acquisition

Discernable speech sounds require reinforcement:Retroflex Consonant

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Language AcquisitionUniversal Grammar Associative Learning

Nativism Empiricism

Noam Chomsky B.F. Skinner

Experience isinsufficient

Experience is sufficient

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Universal Grammar

• Critical Period• Human Specific Behavior• The structure of syntax: The case for

generative grammar• Insufficiency of Experience• Creoles & ASL

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Associative Learning and Language

• While language is a remarkable capacity, a predilection for language acquisition does not imply a “universal grammar”

• Purely associative neural network models can learn language and do so remarkably similarly to humans

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Resolution of The Debate

• Ethology: The Ecological Perspective for Learning: Conrad Lorenz

• Prepared and Unprepared Learning• Nativism Vs. Empiricism Redux: Language

acquisition, as with other learning is associative (empiricism),but occurs within systems adapted for certain types of acquisition (nativism)