Looking into the future by looking back at the past: Observations about Ken Stevens’ views on speech perception

Abstract

There has always been an interest in the perception of speech and non-speech signals. As Ken pointed out 35 years ago (Stevens, 1980), speech signals possess several highly distinctive acoustic properties that set them apart from other auditory signals. He argued that the study of the acoustic properties of classes of speech sounds that occur in natural languages may provide insights about the “special” response characteristics of the auditory system. He observed that all speech sounds have a small number of general properties in common: (1) they have a short-time spectrum that contains peaks and valleys; (2) they have up-and-down variations in amplitude as a function of time; and (3) the short-time spectrum changes over time. I summarize studies with normal-hearing and hearing-impaired listeners with cochlear implants that provide converging support for the conclusion that human listeners have developed highly efficient perceptual processing strategies to make optimal use of minimal acoustic information in the speech signal. [Work supported by grants from NIDCD to Indiana University.]