UALL 2004

PSYCHOLINGUISTICS

Lecture 5

The Biological Foundations of Language

 Learning Outcomes

At the end of this lecture, students will be able to:-

• List all the biological factors related to language

processing
• Summarize the process by which auditory and visual
information is communicated to the brain
• List the properties of auditory system
• Explain color vision in visual system
• Define speech perception and speech chain
• Identify major questions in speech perception

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 What is meant by biological
factors?
• A biological factor is anything that affects the function
and behaviour of a living organism.

• These factors can be physical, physiological, chemical,

neurological, or genetic.

• Biological factors are the primary determinant of human

behaviour and are routinely examined when studying the
causes of mental illness.

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Biological factors (Physiological)
• The Auditory System
• The Visual System
• Speech perception
• Articulatory and acoustic phonetics
• Top-Down and Bottom-Up Processing

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 The Human Auditory System
• Hearing is accomplished via auditory transduction:
– the ear converts sound waves into electrical impulses
that are interpreted by the brain.

• The ear processes acoustic pressure by transforming it

into mechanical vibrations on the basilar membrane.

• The pattern of these vibrations is represented by a series

of pulses to be transmitted by the auditory nerve (to the
brain).

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 The Human Auditory System
(Cont.)
• Sound interpretation or “signal processing” in the
auditory system is done by BOTH the

– ear (peripheral auditory organs)

AND

– brain (auditory nervous system).

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 The Human Auditory System
(Cont.)
• The Human Auditory System consists of:-
– the Outer ear
– the Middle ear
– the Inner ear

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Anatomy of the human ear

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 The Outer Ear
The outer ear consists of the pinna, the auditory canal, and
the tympanic membrane (eardrum).

• The pinna
– “collects” sound and
funnels to the ear
canal;
– acts as a filter helping
us localize sounds.

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 The Outer Ear (Cont.)
• The auditory canal
– acts as an acoustic
tube closed at one
end;

– boosts hearing
sensitivity in the range
2000-5000 Hz (the
range of the human
voice).

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 The Outer Ear (Cont.)
• The tympanic
membrane
– ends the auditory
canal;

– vibrates in response to
the produced sound.

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 The Middle Ear
• The middle ear consists
of the eardrum, to which
three small bones, called
the ossicles, are
attached.

• The ossicles consist of

malleus, incus and
stapes.

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 The Middle Ear (Cont.)
• The eardrum changes pressure variations of incoming
sound waves (through the ear canal) into mechanical
vibrations which are then transmitted via the ossicles to
the inner ear.

• Since the eardrum seals the middle and outer ear, the
Eustachian tube, which connects the middle ear to the
oral cavity, is needed to equalize these two pressures.

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The Middle Ear (Cont.)

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 The Inner Ear
• The cochlea transforms pressure variations into properly
coded neural impulses.

• As a first approximation, consider an unraveled cochlea

and only two main sections separated by the basilar
membrane:
– the scala tympani (bottom)
– the scala vestibule (top)

• The oval and round windows are at the larger end of the
cylinder, and a small hole (helicotrema) is at the smaller
end to connect the two sections.
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The Inner Ear (Cont.)

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 The Human Visual System
• The human visual system consists of two functional
parts, the eye and (part of the) brain.

• The brain does all of the complex image processing,

while the eye functions as the biological equivalent of a
camera.

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 The Human Visual System
(Cont.)
• The eye has three major layers:

– the sclera (white of the eye)

 the white outer layer of the eyeball
 maintains, protects, and supports the shape of the
eye and includes the cornea
 while we can only see the visible portion of the sclera,
it surrounds the entire eye and provides structure for
the internal contents of the eye, which are mostly
made up of a thick liquid called the vitreous humor.

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Sclera

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 Choroid
– the choroid (choroid
coat)
 the vascular layer of
the eye, containing
connective tissues,
and lying between the
retina and the sclera
supplies the outer
retinal with nutrients,
and maintains the
temperature and
volume of the eye
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 Retina
– the retina
 the innermost, light-sensitive layer of tissue of the eye
 located near the optic nerve
 receives light that the lens has focused, convert the
light into neural signals, and send these signals on
the brain for visual recognitions

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Anatomy of the human eye

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 Anatomy of the human eye
(Cont.)
• The human visual system requires communication
between its major sensory organ (the eye) and the core
of the central nervous system (the brain) to interpret
external stimuli (light waves) as images.

• What our eyes perceive of a scene is determined by the

light rays emitted or reflected from that scene.

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 Anatomy of the human eye
(Cont.)
• When these
light rays are
strong enough
(have enough
energy), the
healthy eye will
react to such a
ray by sending
an electric
signal to the
brain through
the optic nerve.

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 Color Vision
• Visual stimulus transduction happens in the retina.
Photoreceptor cells found in this region have the
specialized capability of photo-transduction, or the ability
to convert light into electrical signals.

• There are two types of these photoreceptor cells:

– rods, which are responsible for scotopic vision (night
vision)
– cones, which are responsible for photopic vision
(daytime vision).

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Anatomy of the human eye

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 Color Vision (Cont.)

The front of your eye has many more

cones than rods, while the sides have
more rods than cones; for this reason,
your peripheral vision is sharper than
your direct vision in the darkness.

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 Speech Perception
• Refers to how an individual understands what others are
saying.
• The way a listener can interpret the sound that a speaker
produces.
• Also known as coding and decoding process.

The speech chain: the different forms in which a spoken message exists in
its progress from the mind to the speaker to the mind of the listener.

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Speech Perception (Cont.)

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Speech Perception (Cont.)

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 The Historical Roots of Speech
Perception Research
• Willis (1829) and Helmholtz (1859)
– Studied physical properties of sounds.
– Depended on the development of equipment for
speech analysis and synthesis.

• First machine was developed by Homer Dudley of Bell

Telephone Laboratories in 1939 (vocoder/ voder –
derived from the words voice and coder) – could use to
generate synthetic speech – produced speech
unpleasant “electrical accent” and was difficult to
understand.

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 The Historical Roots of Speech
Perception Research (Cont.)
• The principles used to design vocoder advanced the
development of the sound spectrograph – analyzes
audio signals according to sound frequencies (spectrum)

• An early model built at the Bell Telephone Laboratories

could produce an instantaneous visible record of running
speech (visible speech) (Potter, Kopp, & Green, 1947) –
soon became clear that the moving pattern of speech
sound was impossible to “read”, so the spectrograph
was modified to produce a printout.

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 The Historical Roots of Speech
Perception Research (Cont.)
• The picture generated by a spectrograph is called a
sound spectrogram – stationary display of speech
signal (important for the perception of speech
segments).

• Thus, the roots of speech perception research lie in

commercial and military interest in developing better
communication systems.

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 Major Questions in Speech Perception
1. How do we identify and label phonetic segments?
• Conversational speech tends to be paced at 125-180
words per minute and at this rate, we process
approximately 25-30 phonetic segments per second
(Liberman,1970).

• Refer to the spectrogram below – numerous breaks

(gaps – caused by specific articulatory movements),
individual sounds and words flow together without easily
identifiable boundary markers.

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 Major Questions in Speech Perception
(Cont.)
• Example : A student taking lecture notes.
• Speech does not contain cues for the beginning and
end words or of individual speech units (phonetic
segments).
• When we speak, articulatory gestures are smooth and
continuous. If we were to write speech as it actually
sounds, we might transcribe our lecture notes as
follows:
Spokenwordsarenotseparatedbyspaceslikewordsareinp
rint

• Difficult to read because it is less obvious when words

end and new words begin. 35
 Major Questions in Speech Perception
(Cont.)
• Phonetic segments are not like beads strung on a
string, one segment after another. Rather, it is better to
compare speech to a braid. Why?

• It would help us identify phonetic segments that are

tightly intertwined and overlap greatly.

• One of the greatest challenges for SP researchers is to

determine;
– how individual sounds are isolated (segmented) and
identified from complex speech signal?
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 Major Questions in Speech Perception
(Cont.)
2. The “Lack of Invariance” Problem
• No simple one-to-one correspondence exists between
the phonemes of a language and their acoustic
realization.

• Speech sounds vary considerably in their acoustic

characteristics for several reasons.

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Major Questions in Speech Perception
(Cont.)
– The production of the same phonetic segment varies
depending on the context – what we pronounce
before and after a given segment – overlapping
movements of speech (coarticulation effect (CE)–
allophonic variation, occur when speech sounds are
embedded in certain context, such as initiating words,
ending utterances or neighbors of other specific
sounds (part of CE))

• Example : “Tom Burton tried to steal a butter

plate,” with its many varieties of [t]

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Major Questions in Speech Perception
(Cont.)
– The physical properties of speech sounds, vary
according to whether they have been produced by
men, women or children – vocal tracts differ in size
and configuration.

– We do not pronounce the same utterance in exactly

the same way twice – natural-sounding speech.

– The properties of rapidly articulated conversational

speech

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 Major Questions in Speech Perception
(Cont.)
3. How is speech perceived under less than ideal
conditions?

• Conversational speech – sometimes speaker under-

articulate - words lose their identifying information –
listeners usually have little trouble understanding such
speech.

• Lexical, syntactic, and contextual information – to

interpret ambiguous signals (speech comprehension) -
models of speech perception – to explain the process of
speech understanding.
Thank you  40