Psycholing

9/6/11

Psycholinguistics: Week 2

* Allophones: do not occur in the same environment

(ex. Superman and Clark Kent never exist at the “same” time)

* Gradient vs. Categorical

* Gradient

* Gradability, comparison, dependence on a comparison class

* Categorical

* Discreteness: dead or alive, nothing in between

* Voice onset time (VOT)

* Perceiving VOT

* Step function on graph: discreteness exists (categorical perception)

* Categorical perception

* Mind imposes discrete, abstract categories which do not exist in the physical world.

* Lab 1:

* Email raw data files by 9/16/11 (4 files)

* Email write-up with data by 10/4/11

Experiment:

* Russian vs. Korean

* Three series of stops in Korean:

* Plain: pa, ta, ka

* Glottalized (tense/ejective): p’a, t’a, k’a

* Aspirated: 빠, 따, 까

* Intervocalic plain stop voicing

* 바보 (pabo), 그바보 (kwubabo)

* Categorical perception occurs in different linguistic environment for Koreans and Russians.

* Russians will show categorical discrimination (step function), Koreans won’t

* Korean for any combination of sounds their performance in discriminating Dah and Tah is pretty low.

* Magnetoencephalography

* Coils (super conducting magnetic fields)

* SQUID detectors measure brain magnetic fields around 100 billion times weaker than earth’s steady magnetic field.

* Measuring something that’s happening real-time in the brain.

* Mismatch response

* XXXXXYXXXXYXXXXXXYXXXYXXX…

* Whenever you have this kind of sequence of stimuli, then exposing to a different stimuli start to see deviation.

* Need to have the sequence for same categories for a while and then see something that’s perceptually different in order to see the deviation happen.

* Presentation of sounds that are very different VOT values

* Russians: ta vs. da...