Introduction to Cognitive Psychology - Department of Psychological ...

Professor Greg Francis 1/6/11Rules!! To say a word, we must combine phonemes!! In every language there are rules (trees) thatdescribe what phonemes can follow otherphonemes!! Thus, we can identify possible words fromimpossible words!!plast ptak!!vlas rtut!!thole hladCompression!! Moving the tongue (and otherarticulators) around is difficult and takestime!!to say sounds faster, people usecoarticulation!!shape tongue in advanced preparation forthe next phoneme!!this influences the sound of phonemes!!nypip dnom Purdue UniversityPurdue UniversityCoarticulation!! We generally do not notice theseadjustments!!we are tuned to recognize the new soundsas coarticulation!! This is the main reason computers havea hard time recognizing human speech!Purdue UniversityCoarticulation!! Notice that your tongue body is in differentpositions for the two /k/ sounds in!!Cape Cod!! Note too, that the /s/ becomes /sh/ in!!horseshoe!! And /n/ becomes /m/ in!!NPR!! You can enunciate these “correctly”, but incasual speech you do not!Purdue UniversityCoarticulation!! There are rules for how to coarticulate!! When a stop-consonant appears betweentwo vowels, you do not actually stop!!flapping!! slapped --> slapt!! patting --> padding!! writing --> wridingPurdue UniversitySpelling!! We have often observed that written languageis different from spoken language!! George Bernard Shaw (among others)complained about spelling in English!!he noted you could spell “fish” as “g-h-o-t-i”gh -- tough o -- women ti -- nation!! He offered a prize in his will for someone tocreate a good alternative to English spellingPurdue UniversityPSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 4