Homework 8: Speech Perception Lab
The goal of this homework is to give you hands-on experience with some of the speech perception
phenomena that are being discussed in class. You will test yourself as a subject in a series of
short experiments on speech perception, and you will analyze the data that you generate in the
experiments. In completing the lab, you will learn about
- Differences between native language and non-native speech perception.
- Basic analysis and presentation of judgment and reaction time data.
The experiments in the lab are based on classic identification and discrimination paradigms that
are widely used in speech perception research.
The Hindi sounds used in the experiments were created by Janet Werker (U. of British Columbia),
and are edited natural speech files; the English sounds were generated by Colin Phillips using a
speech synthesizer. The experiments are run using Psyscope, an extremely usable software package
for designing and running experiments on the Macintosh created by Brian MacWhinney, Jonathan
Cohen, Jefferson Provost and colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University, and updated for MacOS X by
a consortium of research groups (including the University of Maryland), led by Luca Bonatti of
SISSA, Trieste, Italy.
Accessing the Lab
The lab will be run in the CNL lab in Marie Mount Hall.
Running the Speech Perception Lab
Analyzing the Speech Perception Lab Results
Graphing the Speech Perception Lab Results
Sample Graphs