Study Guide for Chapter 12

1.         Why do your authors suggest that speech and music can be viewed as the most complicated and abstract perceptual experiences made possible by hearing?     Why are the so complicated? What makes them abstract?

2.         What is paralinguistic information? Can you provide some examples?

3.         Why are males’ voices generally lower-pitched than are females’?

4.         What is a phoneme? Why is it impossible to characterize phonemes in the same way that pure tones are defined?

5.         What is a sound spectrogram? Why does an individual’s sound spectrogram change with age?

6.         What’s a neurogram?

7.         Do monkeys’ brains respond to human speech sounds?

8.         Does the primary auditory cortex show preferential responding to speech sounds?

9.         What is Wernicke’s area? What results from damage to this area?

10.       What is phonagnosia?

11.       Is there a “what pathway” and a “where pathway” for auditory perception?

12.       In what way does context influence speech perception?

13.       How does vision influence speech perception (this is known as the McGurk effect).

14.       What are some of the events that create speech boundaries?

15.       What is speech dysfluency and what effect does it have on the listener?

16.       What is prodody?

17.       How can a child with a language-based learning impairment be helped?

18.       What is a melody? What about a melody contour?

19.       What is pitch constancy?

20.       What is  absolute pitch? Can you learn to have absolute pitch?

21.       Would you rather have relative pitch or amusia? Why?

22.       Describe rhythm.

23.       What aspects of a musical passage are important in imparting emotional connotation? Are these emotional connotations learned?