1. Midterm post mortem I’ve graded about 2/3 of them so far.
You folks did really well. Congrats!
Things which people tended to get wrong =
Things I didn’t teach clearly enough

2. Spatial and temporal resolution of brain imaging methods
From the Baars textbook chapter reading

3. Spectrograms and formants: Sound frequencies along time
Formant = Peak in speech sound's frequency spectrum
F0 = fundamental freq, F1 = 1st peak, F2 = 2nd peak, etc.
McGettigan, C., & Scott, S. K. (2012). Cortical asymmetries in speech perception: what's wrong, what's right and what's left?. Trends in cognitive sciences, 16(5),

4. Spectrograms and formants: Sound frequencies along time
Formant = Peak in speech sound's frequency spectrum
F0 = fundamental freq, F1 = 1st peak, F2 = 2nd peak, etc.
McGettigan, C., & Scott, S. K. (2012). Cortical asymmetries in speech perception: what's wrong, what's right and what's left?. Trends in cognitive sciences, 16(5),

5. Spectrograms and formants: Sound frequencies along time
Formant = Peak in speech sound's frequency spectrum
F0 = fundamental freq, F1 = 1st peak, F2 = 2nd peak, etc.
McGettigan, C., & Scott, S. K. (2012). Cortical asymmetries in speech perception: what's wrong, what's right and what's left?. Trends in cognitive sciences, 16(5),

6. Spectrograms: the movie

7. Place of articulation
McGettigan, C., & Scott, S. K. (2012). Cortical asymmetries in speech perception: what's wrong, what's right and what's left?. Trends in cognitive sciences, 16(5),

8. Some example formant transitions

9. Spectrograms
/ba/
/da/
Rajeev Raizada - SFN talk, Nov 2002

10. Vowels in formant space

11. Same speech sound, very different formant patterns

12. How do we pull out the “invariant” sound?
An interesting (but misguided?) theory:
The motor theory of speech perception (Liberman et al.)
You don't actually pull out an invariant sound
You somehow perceive the motor articulation which made the sound

13. An analogy: The skull theory of face recognition
Google Images search for “Jon Stewart”

14. If motor theory is true, then motor-cortex damage should impair speech perception
But that turns out not to be the case
Stasenko, A., Garcea, F. E., & Mahon, B. Z. (2013). What happens to the motor theory of perception when the motor system is damaged?. Language and Cognition, 5(2-3),
Nonetheless, motor cortex is often active during language tasks.
What is it doing?

15. Sine-wave speech: Made of nothing but formants
What makes speech sound the way it does?
Sine-wave speech demo page:
arwin/SWS/
How on earth can these weird whistles sound like spoken words?