Language and lateralization
Categorical perception example: Speech sounds
Source-filter model of speech
What is speech?
Speech production
English vowels: formants
PPT Slide
Speech perception is very difficult. It is also categorical.
Vowels tend to be perceived continuously
Consonants tend to be perceived in terms of known categories, such as ba, da, and ga.
Recognition of a letter is a process of constraint satisfaction
CALM: Categorizing And Learning Module By Murre, Phaf, & Wolters (1992)
Pictures derived from Adriaan Tijsseling at http://pavlov.rutgers.edu/~adriaan/Soft/Poise/CALM/ (after Murre, 1992)
Activation rule
Learning rule
Main processes in the CALM module
Language
What is language?
Language is hierarchical and can be extremely ambiguous
Grammar may be innate
The essence of grammar is recursion
Where does language come from?
Universal constraints in thought development
Selection versus instruction
Bickerton: Not all languages may be equally hard to learn
Relative location of language areas in the brain
Early model of language in the brain
Schematic model (oversimplified)
Willem Levelt's model of speech production and perception
From concept to speech signal
Very complicated transformation take place during speaking
Semantic networks may be used to help think about the associative networks in the brain
Better is it to view concepts as vectors of abstract `features'
Where is language located in the brain?
PET data corroborate the lesion data
How can semantic organization be organized according to category?
Semantic organization can emerge on the basis of word context (Ritter and Kohonen, 1990)
Example of a semantotopic map
Email: jaap@murre.com
Home Page: http://www.neuromod.org/courses/
Other information: neuroMod: Home of the Neural and Cognitive Modeling Group at the University of Amsterdam.
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