| Abstract | [Introduction]
Why do we study speech perception? Is the speech signal merely a complex acoustic structure in which we are interested because we happen to use it for communication? Certainly, speech belongs to a natural class of acoustic patterns about which we know very little, namely, patterns structure over time by mechanical events-such as a footstep on gravel, a hand crumpling paper, a glass bottle bouncing or breaking (Warren, in preparation). If we knew more about the temporally and spectrally distributed acoustic properties of such dynamic events, and how we recognize them, would we then understand how we perceive speech? In other words, is speech merely a distinctive set of sounds, shaped, as no other sounds are, by movements of human articulators modulating a characteristic vocal structure? Perhaps. |
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