Psychophysics versus Specialized Processes in Speech Perception: An Alternative Perspective

Abstract

The title of this conference describes one of the two major contrasting frameworks for speech perception research during the last three decades. This point of view is that speech perception can be understood by the principles of auditory psychophysics. Speech involves complex auditory signals and the processing and perception of speech can be understood by the rules of processing complex auditory signals. Research representative of the paradigm has been contributed by Cutting and Rosner (1974), Kuhl and Miller (1975, 1978), Pastore, Ahroon, Baffuto, Friedman, Puleo, and Fink (1977), and Pisoni (1977). The other point of view, the antithesis of the first, is that speech perception represents the operation of a set of specialized processes unique to speech. This view began as the motor theory of speech perception (Liberman, Cooper, Shankweiler, & Studdert-Kennedy, 1967) and has evolved into an illustration of the modularity principle (Fodor, 1983; Liberman & Mattingly, 1985). Representative studies within this paradigm can be found in Best, Morrongiello, and Robson (1981), Eimas and Corbit (1973), Eimas and Miller (1980), and Repp (1982).