Speech perception

Speech perception is the process by which the sounds of language are heard, interpreted and understood. The study of speech perception is closely linked to the fields of phonology and phonetics in linguistics and cognitive psychology and perception in psychology. Research in speech perception seeks to understand how human listeners recognize speech sounds and use this information to understand spoken language.

Overview

Speech perception involves the processes of auditory perception that leads to the perception of spoken words. Different speakers can produce the same speech sound differently, yet listeners are still able to reliably identify the speech sound. Speech perception is not necessarily uni-directional. Research has shown that perception can also influence speech production.

Theories

There are several theories about how humans perceive speech, including Motor Theory, Direct Realism, Cohort Theory, Fuzzy logic and Neural Oscillation.

Motor Theory

The Motor Theory of speech perception posits that people perceive spoken words by identifying the vocal tract gestures with which they are pronounced rather than by identifying the sound patterns that speech produces.

Direct Realism

Direct Realism, on the other hand, suggests that listeners perceive speech by listening to the acoustic signals in the speech of others.

Cohort Theory

The Cohort Theory suggests that word recognition, a part of speech perception, involves the simultaneous activation of a set of candidates, which are then narrowed down.

Fuzzy Logic

The Fuzzy logic model of speech perception posits that listeners categorize speech sounds probabilistically.

Neural Oscillation

The Neural Oscillation theory suggests that speech perception is a rhythmic process, which involves the oscillation of neural activity.

See also

• Phonetics
• Phonology
• Cognitive psychology
• Perception
• Auditory perception

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Speech perception

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  Spectrograms of syllables "dee", "dah", "doo"

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  Spectrogram of "I owe you"

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  Standard and normalized vowel space

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  Categorization and discrimination curves