Evidence for a special speech-perceiving subsystem in the human.
| Number | 217 |
|---|---|
| Year | 1977 |
| Drawer | 4 |
| Entry Date | 06/03/1999 |
| Authors | Liberman, A. M., & Pisoni, D. B. |
| Contact | |
| Publication | In T. H. Bullock (Ed.), Recognition of complex acoustic signals. Berlin: Dahlem Konferenzen, 59-76. |
| url | http://www.haskins.yale.edu/Reprints/HL0217.pdf |
| Abstract | If we want to discover whether man is specialized to process speech so as to recover phonetic segments, we must, of course, make the appropriate comparisons with nonhuman animals. To promote that undertaking, we here identify a distinctive characteristic of phonetic (as opposed to auditory) perception, and we describe some phenomena of human speech perception, appropriate for testing with animals, in which that characteristic seems to be exhibited. The distinctive characteristic is that the perceptual process is constrained as if by ‘knowledge’ of what vocal tracts do when they make linguistically significant gestures. The distinctive phenomena are taken from instances of stop-consonant perception. There, the role of a necessary acoustic cue--silence--is to inform the listener that the speaker closed his vocal tract, as he must if he is to produce a stop consonant; and the equivalence in perception of very different acoustic cues--temporal vs. spectral, for example--is to be accounted for on the ground that, though presumably unrelated in auditory perception, they are the distributed results of the same articulatory gesture. If it were possible to perceive the words of language simply as auditory patterns--that is, without regard to their constituent phonetic elements--then neither phonetic structure nor its perception would be of great biological interest. But such a nonphonetic strategy would, in practice, severely limit the number of words a listener could identify and immensely complicate the processes by which he extracts those words from the stream of speech. |
| Notes |
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