A brief history of speech perception research in the United States.
| Number | 1143 |
|---|---|
| Year | 1999 |
| Drawer | 21 |
| Entry Date | 11/24/1999 |
| Authors | Studdert-Kennedy, Michael and Whalen, D. H. |
| Contact | |
| Publication | In A. Bronstein, J.Ohala & W.Weigel (eds) A guide to the history of the phonetic sciences in the United States. University of California Press: Berkeley CA. |
| url | http://www.haskins.yale.edu/Reprints/HL1143.pdf |
| Abstract | [Introduction] A hundred and fifty years ago, Alexander Melville Bell (1849) prefigured an insight that has come to shape research on speech perception only in recent decades: There is a powerful link between the way we perceive speech and the way we produce it. Bell’s system of transcription, his “visible speech” (Bell, 1867), reportedly allowed speakers who knew the system to reproduce exactly any utterance not only in languages they knew, but in languages they did not. Thus, by the intermediary of a phonetic script, Bell unfolded the imitative capacity implicit in every untutored child who automatically recovers from speech the articulatory gestures that shape it, and so learns to speak a native language. Yet, curiously, modern studies of speech perception and speech production have generally followed separate paths at laboratories where only one or the other topic was of interest. Only quite recently have researchers begun to argue that a viable theory of speech perception must be grounded in a viable theory of speech production, and vice versa. The reaction to this stance, either for or against, defines much of the field of speech perception today. |
| Notes |
Search Publications