Homework 4

Speech Perception Lab

Posted Monday April 11th, due (i) Complete experiment and look at results by Monday, April 18th, (ii) Submit write-up by Friday April 22nd. This homework will be counted as one and a half assignments.

The goal of this homework is to give you hands-on experience with some of the speech perception phenomena that are being discussed in class. You will run yourself as a subject in a series of short experiments on speech perception, and you will analyze the data that you generate in the experiments. In completing the lab, you will learn about

• Differences between native language and non-native speech perception.
• Basic analysis and presentation of judgment and reaction time data.

The experiments in the lab are based on classic identification and discrimination paradigms that are widely used in speech perception research.

• Accessing the Lab
• Running the Experiments
• Analyzing the Data
• Graphing the Data
• Sample Graphs

The Hindi sounds used in the experiments were created by Janet Werker (U. of British Columbia), and are edited natural speech files; the English sounds were generated by Colin Phillips using a speech synthesizer. The experiments are run using Psyscope, an extremely usable software package for designing and running experiments on the Macintosh created by Brian MacWhinney, Jonathan Cohen, Jefferson Provost and colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University.

[Note: If you are a course instructor who is interested in using this lab exercise in a course, feel free to copy the files and modify them as you see fit. Please do so under the two following conditions: (i) you acknowledge the source of the lab if you make it available electronically (including the Hindi sound-files created by Janet Werker), and (ii) you share any improvements that you make to the lab. In this way, the resources will continue to be improved for the benefit of everybody. Contact Colin Phillips - colin@glue.umd.edu - if you have any questions or comments.]