Understanding Speech Understanding

Abstract

The perception of segments of speech one or two phonemes long is now quite well understood. This is because listeners rather readily accept the sort of experimental situation where they are asked simply to identify brief utterances, not always meaningful words in their language. A variety of powerful paradigms using variants of simple identification (for example reaction times and dichotic presentation) have been developed to specify factors involved in identifying these short segments of speech. Those not trained in the intellectual tradition of analytical experimental science are easily dissatisfied with the formal as opposed to superficial relevance that these tasks have to the perception of speech in real life situations, and those of us who have been studying perception at the phonemic level for many years have a kind of obligation not to rebuff their demands that we should be concerned with chunks of material of size that could actually constitute an utterance in a communication situation. Hence the title of this symposium “Dynamic Aspects of Speech Perception” is deliberately vague to avoid the implication that we are exclusively concerned with prosody, syntax, pragmatics or whatever. We are concerned with continuous speech perception.