Some Psycholinguists’ Reactions to the Symposium on Dynamic Aspects of Speech Perception

Abstract

The organizers of this Symposium have asked us to give some psycholinguists’ reactions to what has been reported and discussed during this conference. They presumably hoped that such naive observers would be able to look objectively at the emperor’s clothes. Our reaction to this is two-fold: (l) Though it may be disappointing, we have not observed any nudity. On the contrary, we were impressed by the richness of methods, phenomena and theoretical concerns among speech perception (SP) researchers. (2) We did not feel excentric to this meeting at all. Not only are many speech researchers psychologists by training, but also more generally we experienced considerable openness with respect to psychological theory, and psycho-linguistic experimentation in language perception. If one compares the present situation with earlier work in SP, one finds a strongly increased interest in syntactic, semantic and even textual aspects of the speech signal. There is certainly a realistic common base now for students of “speech” and “language” perception to cooperate, and to integrate their theories.