Haskins Publications

Number	163
Year	1974
Drawer	3
Entry Date	06/11/1998
Authors	Cutting, J. E., & Rosner, B. S.
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Publication	Perception & Psychophysics, 16, 564-570
url	http://www.haskins.yale.edu/Reprints/HL0163.pdf
Abstract	Considers that perceptual categories and boundaries arise when subjects respond to continuous variation on a physical dimension in a discontinuous fashion. It is more difficult to discriminate between members of the same category than to discriminate between members of different categories, even though the amount of physical difference between both pairs is the same. Speech stimuli have been the sole class of auditory signals to yield such perception; for example, each different consonant phoneme serves as a category label. The present experiments were conducted with a total of 32 undergraduate subjects. Experiment I demonstrated that categories and boundaries occurred for both speech and nonspeech stimuli differing in rise time. Experiment II showed that rise time cued categorical differences in both complex and simple nonspeech waveforms. Taken together, these results suggest that certain aspects of speech perception are intimately related to processes and mechanisms exploited in other domains. The many categories in speech may be based on categories that occur elsewhere in auditory perception.
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