An encounter with Praat

Shameless as it may seem, but yes. I am extremely late (haha). Nevertheless, I still wanted to write about this because there is one point in Speech Perception that I’ve come to be fascinated about.

It all boils down to my past. Linguistics.

Yes. I was a Linguistic Major for two years (though I was really supposed to be an HRIM major, long story. Nevermind). And would you believe that I shifted to psychology out of impulse while I was passing by AS 101? *please don’t judge me haha* Anyway, what I really like to discuss is the spectrogram, oh yes, the never-ending affair of linguists with spectrograms, which I never thought I would encounter again in my life as a psychology major.

But before any spectrogram convo, when I was still an innocent UP student, my life as a linguistics major was filled with phonemes, morphemes, semantics, syntax, and all those kind of ideas that I never thought it existed. Phonemes were especially fun because we managed to have an International Phonetic Alphabet (Version 2005), a chart of phonemes where all the sounds by almost all of the recognized languages all over the world are arranged in a chart, depending on how it is pronounced. Those were the basics that one will learn in Lingg110. It was also thanks to this that now I know how to pronounce the alveolar trill [r] just like how you pronounce the first r’s in Spanish words. Just put the tip of your tongue just above your upper teeth and then blow out air. I tried it a lot of times and now I’m an expert in Rrrrrrr!

Anyway, back to spectrograms. For linguists, they usually use a computer software program called Praat to generate spectrograms from their recording participants. This is what is used in studying certain language features like secondary stress, tone of voice in a word vs sentences, pitch, etc. For example, there is a difference in terms of peak of pitch position and in terms of syllable durations when it comes to pronouncing [magna’nakaw] ‘stealing’ and [mag’nanakaw] ‘stealing’. Between the two, given that the apostrophe marks the stress, which between the two is the action of stealing? Which between the two is the human who steals? How about [ˌmaŋɪŋɪsˈda] and [maˌŋɪŋɪsˈda]?

For a linguist, how he or she deals with this kind of stress problem is through recording the two words and then having the participant choose which is the action of stealing and which is the human who steals. This is just so that the perception of speech meaning based on acoustic signals and some top-down processing factors is also accounted for the study. So in essence, this is a somehow psycholinguistic approach of studying speech perception and at the same time grammar of Tagalog. I wonder if this is possible to happen for Psych 145 or Psych 135 itself for that matter? Or what if the syllable duration falls longest on the syllable which the participant did not perceive as a word meaning pertaining to that certain longest syllable? This can therefore suggest that in Tagalog language, two words can have the same kind of phonemes, but then the pitch and duration were changed, further changing the meaning of the word (minimal pairs). Or what if even if pitch and duration were changed, it doesn’t really matter as long as the word said was mutually intelligible? For example, saying [maa’lam] and [ma’alam] ‘know well about something’ need not be explained further that its meaning is the same, so although the stimuli feature was changed, our knowledge of meanings changed the whole story – therefore an interaction of bottom-up and top-down processing!

Can I just say that for the past few days all that is happening in my surroundings, some sort of 135 concept pops up in my mind? For example, when a friend asks me if a certain food was nice, I’m not going to say anything because I don’t want his perception of flavor to be affected in a top-down process way by what I will say. When Lenard, Jane, and I were eating in McDo and were talking about the differences in sweetness of the Heinz tomato ketchup sachets via the number indicated in the sachet. We tried to taste the difference between level 1 and level 4 but there was nothing. Then we thought probably that there’s a threshold of sweetness since the level goes up to 7! This has nothing to do with speech perception! But this is something that is going on for the past few weeks in my mind and I really need to share this!

And that ends my extremely super-duper shameless late post for the blog for the fourth exam. Mehehe.

==Kate Ilene V. Ang==

References:

Goldstein, E. B. (2010). Chemical senses. In E. Goldstein (Ed.), Sensation and perception 

         (8 ed., pp. 355-378). Canada: Wadsworth Cengage Learning.