The Special Nature of Speech Perception

抄録

The perception of speech has been the subject of laboratory studies only about 30 years. Prior to that time, speech perception was not an important part of acoustical phonetics, nor was it prominent in studies on hearing. In these last 30 years, speech perception has become an important subject in acoustical phonetics, largely as a result of technological developments, but the theory and speculation about the speech-perception process has been too much separated from modern developments in psychophysics. In this paper, we shall review some of the bases for concepts like “categorical perception” and “listening in the speech mode”, and will show that a more parsimonious interpretation might be more generally auditory and psychophysical than “special” for speech. There do indeed appear to be special attributes of perception for speech, but they appear to be associated more with special circumstances of learning of speech sounds, as opposed to other sounds.