Speech Perception

Abstract

The scientific study of the perception of spoken language has been a productive area of research for over fifty years. During this period, we have learned much about infants' and adults' remarkable capacities for perceiving and understanding the sounds of their language. We present a selective review of the past half century of research on speech perception, focusing on three principle topics: early work on the discrimination and categorization of speech sounds, more recent efforts to understand the processes and representations responsible for spoken word recognition, and research on how infants acquire the capacity to perceive their native language. Our intent is to provide the reader with a sense of the progress our field has made over the last half century in understanding the human's extraordinary capacity for the perception of spoken language.

Sound specificity effects in spoken word recognition: The effect of integrality between words and sounds

“…Early models of spoken word recognition endorsed an abstractionist view of lexical representations in memory (e.g., Distributed Cohort Model: Gaskell & Marslen-Wilson, 1997PARSYN: Luce, Goldinger, Auer, & Vitevitch, 2000;Shortlist: Norris, 1994;TRACE: McClelland & Elman, 1986; see Jusczyk & Luce, 2002, for a review), in which the underlying assumption is that the speech signal is mapped onto abstract linguistic representations. Accordingly, nonlinguistic information pertaining to the talker's voice (otherwise known as indexical information) is deemed irrelevant for spoken word recognition and is discarded early in the processing stages through a process typically referred to as normalization (Jusczyk & Luce, 2002;Lachs, McMichael, & Pisoni, 2003;Pisoni, 1997).…”

Abstractness and Specificity in Spoken Word Recognition: Indexical and Allophonic Variability in Long-Term Repetition Priming

“…Speech scientists frequently make a subtle, and often unspoken, distinction between two closely allied areas of research: speech perception and spoken word recognition (Jusczyk and Luce, 2002). Research on speech perception is typically concerned with consonants, vowels, and syllables, and focuses on such fundamental problems as invariance (are there acoustic events that consistently signal a given speech sound?)…”

Serial processing in melody identification and the organization of musical semantic memory

“…For example, whereas presenting a subject with the name of a distractor does not influence the identification of line drawings (Snodgrass & Hirshman, 1991), such a manipulation reliably decreases the identification of familiar melodies (Schulkind, 2002). Furthermore, lateral competition-interference caused by nontarget foils (e.g., knowledge of "dog" interferes with identifying "cat")-is a central component of most theories of visual object and spoken word identification (Jusczyk & Luce, 2002) but does not appear to play a role in melody identification (Schulkind, 2004).…”

“…Although several lines of evidence support the idea that word onsets are vital for identification (e.g., Marslen-Wilson & Zwitserlood, 1989;Warren & Marslen-Wilson, 1987, evidence does not support the most stringent claim that identification cannot occur if initial phonemes are ambiguous or erroneous (Marslen-Wilson, Moss, & van Halen, 1996). It should also be noted that no other prominent theory of spoken word identification confers any special status on the initial phonemes of a word (see Jusczyk & Luce, 2002, for a review).…”