Haskins Publications

Number	117
Year	1972
Drawer	2
Entry Date	05/21/1998
Authors	Mattingly, I. G.
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Publication	American Scientist, 60, 327-337.
url	http://www.haskins.yale.edu/Reprints/HL0117.pdf
Abstract	[Introduction] The perception of the linguistic information in speech, as investigations carried on over the past twenty years have made clear, depends not on a general resemblance between presently and previously heard sounds but on a quite complex system of acoustic cues, which has been called by Liberman et al. (1967) the “speech code.” These authors suggest that a special perceptual mechanism is used to detect and decode the speech cues. I wish to draw attention here to some interesting formal parallels between these cues and a well-known class of animal signals, “sign stimuli,” described by Lorenz, Tinbergen, and others. These formal parallels suggest some speculations about the original biological function of speech and the related problem of the origin of language.
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