Auditory Phonetics: experiment

Reading: C&Y Chapter 8, esp. pp. 301-327.

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, and models of perception.

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:

• Phonetic aspects of perception:
  • Physical aspects:
    • the anatomy of the ear
    • the physical and physiological functions of the ear
  • Cognitive aspects:
    • intelligibility of speech
    • perception: vowels, consonants
    • categorial perception, the simple and complex units of perception
    • perception of prosody
    • perception of words
  • Background: general models of speech perception
• Grammatical and lexical aspects: analysis, parsing
• Semantic aspects: integration, understanding, semantic interpretation

Tasks:

• Make a glossary for the terms given above, starting with physical aspects.
• Search the web for material on the paradigm of categorial perception, with examples and if possible descriptions of experiments with typical graphical representations of the results.