Abstract
Over the last dozen years, there has been much speculation concerning the possibility of auditory underpinnings to the structure of phonemic categories. Support for this hypothesis is usually drawn from studies of categorical perception, a mode of perception in which it was originally supposed that sounds can only be discriminated from one another to the extent to which they are labelled differently. This is meant to contrast with the more common situation, often called “continuous perception”, in which the ability to discriminate far outstrips the ability to label differentially (Miller, 1956). Practically speaking, a continuum is said to be categorically perceived when there is: (1) a sharp categorization function, (2) a peak in the discrimination function at the category boundary and (3) near-chance discrimination performance within categories (Studdert-Kennedy, Liberman, Harris, and Cooper, 1970). Categorical perception was initially thought to be confined to speech sounds, and to arise from a reference to some aspect of the articulatory process (Liberman, Cooper, Shankweiler, and Studdert-Kennedy, 1967). Since then, the phenomena of categorical perception have been obtained with a number of nonspeech auditory continua, and even with visual stimuli (e.g., Pastore, Ahroon, Baffuto, Friedman, Puleo, and Fink, 1977).
This work has been supported by the Medical Research Council of the United Kingdom.
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© 1987 Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, Dordrecht
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Rosen, S., Howell, P. (1987). Is there a Natural Sensitivity at 20 ms in Relative Tone-Onset-Time Continua? A Reanalysis of Hirsh’s (1959) Data. In: Schouten, M.E.H. (eds) The Psychophysics of Speech Perception. NATO ASI Series, vol 39. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-3629-4_15
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