Auditory‐perceptual approaches to phonetic perception

Abstract

While acknowledging the important role of “top‐down” processing in perceiving and understanding the speech of others, it is argued that an auditory‐perceptual system which is modifiable by early experience and which is highly sensitive to spectral‐temporal relations within speech sounds may eventually account for many of the facts of phonetic perception. Evidence pointing in this direction can be found in the perception of human speech by animals and human infants; in data pointing toward invariant, relational acoustic cues for phones whether consonant or vowels, and in comparison of the identification, discrimination, and adaptation of speech and nonspeech. The major shortcoming of auditory‐perceptual interpretations has been the failure to provide a sensible approach to phenomena such as talker and rate normalization, cross‐language differences, effects of “spectral trajectories,” and phoneme boundary shifts based on spectral‐temporal alterations of synthetic syllables. Suggestions for new approaches to these matters are offered. [Supported by NINCDS Grant NS 03856.]