The role of systematic variation in speech perception

Abstract

A signature problem in our understanding of spoken language processing is the highly variable nature of the speech signal. The realization of linguistic form changes profoundly from utterance to utterance, individual speaker to individual speaker, and group of speakers to group of speakers. On the one hand, this high degree of variation is a problem for accounts of speech perception and spoken language comprehension. Listeners must maintain robust perceptual constancy in the face of the enormous variability in the instantiation of linguistic form. On the other hand, listeners are sensitive to the fine-grained structure of linguistic segments that signals differences among talkers and speaking styles. Variation is informative providing important cues to attributes of the individual speaker and social context. Empirical and theoretical work will be presented that attempts to reconcile the stability of speech perception with the informative nature of systematic variation. This work suggests that listeners both dynamically adapt to systematic changes in linguistic category structure and encode linguistically relevant variation in representations of spoken language. The findings suggest considerable behavioral and representational plasticity in speech perception and spoken language processing and highlight the importance of lawful variation for spoken communication.