NU Splash Biography

When we hear speech, what we hear is not as neat as what we believe it to be. In fact, a stream of speech is more akin to "somethinglikethiswhereyougetnodistinctsignalsthatindicatethestartandtheendofwordorphraseorsentence." Nevertheless, we are masters at parsing speech signals and have strong intuitions that allows us to categorize what are actually very subtle, gradient distinctions. In particular English speakers are confident in telling apart the /b/ sound from the /p/ sound in "pat" and "bat," in judging"ksrpiw" as an impossible English word and "blarks" as a possible English word, and in creating word, phrase, and sentence boundaries where they don't exist. But what underlies these intuitions? And how can we make these judgments so effortlessly despite the messiness of human speech, which is fundamentally just complicated noise? In this session, we will explore human speech from multiple dimensions, including acoustic physics, anatomy, cognitive science, linguistics, and psychology. We will toy around with a speech analysis software to help us visualize sound, and learn about the features of consonants and vowels, mainly from English, but also those found in other languages.