Chapter 11: Hearing in Complex Environments
This final chapter on the auditory senses covers the more complex problems of hearing in a busy world. One topic is Auditory Scene Analysis: you can never close your ears, so you’re constantly bombarded with the sounds around you, but how do you make sense of where those sounds are coming from? The second topic is speech production and speech processing. Understanding spoken language is a remarkable auditory skill.
Learning Objectives
- Describe some of the theories about human language development
- Describe what makes human language unique
- Explain the separate roles of respiration, phonation, and articulation in the production of speech
- Differentiate between the basic components of language: Phonemes, morphemes, semantics and synt
- Describe what spectrogram (time-frequency plot) is.
- Describe the difference between consonants and vowel sounds in terms of their spectograms
- Describe why speech is hard to understand: the segmentation problem, co-articulation problem, speaker problem.
- Explain how speech perception is influenced by visual information and describe the McGurk effect
- Explain the concept of voice-onset time (VOT) and its relationship to categorical perception
- Describe the parts of the brain associated with language
- Compare and contrast 3 primary kinds of aphasia: expressive, receptive, and conduction aphasia.
- Differentiate the functions of the Wernicke’s area and Broca’s area in speech perception and reading
This chapter was modified from the original by Jill Grose-Fifer and was originally created by Naomi Beutel, Jingyi Chen, Chandni Jaspal, Cameron Kennedy, Rebecca King, Rachel Lam, Jin Yong Lee, Lilly McLaughlin, Zamzam Mo’Allin, Samira Moalim-Yusuf, Autumn Nelsen, and Abby Popp.
