06.06.2002 Speech perception

Speech perception is part of the complex field of reception of spoken language, which covers the following two main areas:

• the ear: anatomy and physiology of the internal structure of the ear
• the brain: processing of sound

This distinction can be structured further from a linguistic point of view into three main phases, of which we are mainly concerned with the first:

• perception:
  • the anatomy of the ear
  • the physical and physiological functions of the ear
  • intelligibility of speech
  • perception: vowels, consonants
  • categorial perception, the simple and complex units of perception
  • perception of prosody
  • perception of words
  • general models of speech perception
• analysis, parsing (grammar, lexicon)
• integration, understanding (meaning, semantic interpretation)

Task:

Search the web for materials on

• the terms given above
• categorial perception (with examples and if possible descriptions of experiments with typical graphical representations of the results)

Example: a vowel perception test.