Speech perception in prelexical processing is reviewed mainly due to the research of
the author of this paper to show a view of speech perception.
Phonemic features are distributed in time course by co-articulation in speech pro-
duction. The distributed features are perceptually integrated to perceive the phoneme
according to the intensity of the feature. The basic perceptual unit of speech is larger
than phoneme unit. It is determined due to the timing (rhythmic) system of the lis-
tener’s native language e.g. syllable (French), mora (Japanese), unit determined due
to stress (English). These results indicate that the perceptual integration of phonemic
feature is organized to perceive a basic perceptual unit.
Then cross-linguistic experiments among French, Dutch and Japanese show that a
listener of each language perceive the unit not to violate the phonotactic constraints
of his/her native language. The results show that it is important to take into account
language rhythmic system to learn the language as the second one.
Finally, it is proposed that the study of speech perception could contribute to that
of language acquisition and second language learning and vice versa.
