Establishing and maintaining perceptual coherence: unimodal and multimodal evidence

Abstract

Studies of perceptual organization of speech aim to produce a direct characterization of the fundamental aspect of speech perception by which the listener resolves the acoustically heterogeneous elements of speech into a coherent sensory stream. This primitive function determines a sensory sample fit to analyze for linguistic properties. Organizational functions that apply to speech appear to be fast, unlearned, intended, nonsymbolic and indifferent to the familiar short-term sensory qualities of vocally produced sound. Although primitive auditory organizing principles deriving from the classic Gestalt set fail to accommodate the acoustic variety of speech signals, a claim of specialization in the auditory perceptual organization of speech is not warranted. Multimodal instances of perceptual organization reveal that the detection of coherence across modalities shares formal properties with the detection of coherence within the auditory modality.