SPPA 601: Speech Science

Study Guide for Exam 1

Notes: This study guide is intended to give you a general idea of some of the topics that might be covered on the exam, and to help you organize your studying. It is not intended to cover all of the topics that might be appear on the exam. In addition to the kinds of questions that are shown below, there may also be multiple choice questions, matching items, and diagrams that you would be asked to label.

  1. List and briefly explain the four kinds of information that are conveyed by a speech signal.
  1. List and briefly explain (using examples where you think they’d help) the Six Tough Problems that were encountered by Franklin Cooper and other early speech researchers who were attempting to understand the speech code.
  1. What was the big problem with the original Haskins Labs reading machine and what did this have to do with the decision of the Haskins team to take a break from the reading machine to study speech?
  1. It’s pretty obvious why the speech analysis capabilities of the sound spectrograph machine would be very helpful in trying to understand how the speech code works. What capability did the Pattern Playback machine provide and why did speech researchers find this machine to be so useful?
  1. Give an example to illustrate what is meant by the context sensitivity or invariance problem.
  1. What do speech and Morse code have in common? What kinds of problems need to be solved in order to crack either code?
  1. What does it mean to say that different layers of the language hierarchy are distinct or autonomous? Give examples that demonstrate the autonomy of: (a) syntax and semantics, (b) phonetics and phonology, and (c) semantics and pragmatics.
  1. Give an example to show what is meant by a recursive tree structure.
  1. Explain the basic processes that are involved in the propagation of a sound wave. Begin your explanation with a vibrating object and end at the tympanic membrane of a listener.
  1. What is a spring and mass system and what rules control the natural vibrating frequency of a spring and mass system? Why do we bother learning about springs and masses since there’s pretty much nothing in the speech or hearing system that remotely resembles a spring-mass combination?
  1. Draw time- and frequency-domain representations of simple periodic, complex periodic, complex aperiodic/noise, and complex aperiodic/transient sounds.
  1. Draw time- and frequency-domain representations of: (a) two sounds with the same fundamental frequency and different spectrum envelopes, and (b) two sounds with the same spectrum envelope and different fundamental frequencies.
  1. A complex periodic signal has a fundamental period of 2 msec. What is the fundamental frequency of the signal? If we examine the spectrum below 2,700 Hz, at what frequencies would we expect to find harmonics?
  1. Give an example of the following kinds of graphs, being sure to label both axes:
  1. amplitude spectrum
  2. phase spectrum
  3. frequency-response curve
  4. time-domain representation
  5. frequency-domain representation

15. What is a frequency response curve and how is it different from an amplitude spectrum?

16. In what way does a pair of tinted sunglasses behave like a filter?

17. Give a brief explanation of the basic idea behind Fourier analysis.

18. Draw and label frequency-response curves for low-pass, high-pass, band-pass and band-reject filters.

19. Show the frequency response curve for a 35 cm uniform tube that is closed at one end only.

20. The peaks that are found in a frequency response curve such as the one in the question above are:

  1. formants
  2. natural vibrating frequencies
  3. fundamental frequencies
  4. one fundamental frequency and some number of harmonics
  5. one fundamental frequency and some number of overtones
  6. one fundamental frequency and some number of harmonics
  7. one fundamental frequency and some number of octaves
  8. one fundamental frequency and some number of formants
  9. resonances
  10. harmonics

21. Draw a narrow- and wide-band spectrograms of a sustained vowel. Which of these spectrograms are best for seeing the formant frequency patterns of the vowel? How would you measure fundamental frequency from the narrow-band spectrogram? How would you measure fundamental frequency from the wide-band spectrogram?