Speech Perception

Course Description

In this course, different questions about how speech is perceived will be addressed each week.

Week 01: How has speech perception been studied, and what are basic findings? What is categorical perception, and what is categorically perceived? Are speech sounds perceived differently from or similarly to acoustically similar non-speech sounds? Do adult human listeners perceive speech sounds differently from infant human listeners or from non-human listeners?

Week 02: What are the theories of speech perception? Do listeners perceive the articulations that produce the acoustic properties that they hear or the auditory qualities produced by those acoustic properties? What are the motor, direct realist, and auditorist theories of speech perception, and what is the evidence supporting or challenging each of these theories?

Week 03: How does speech perception influence synchronic phonological patterns and diachronic sound changes? How does perceptual similarity constrain possible alternations and neutralizations? How do differences between contexts in the availability and quality of perceptual cues do so? How does the listener’s parse of the speech signal’s acoustic properties trigger sound changes?

Week 04: How is speech perception influenced by native listeners’ linguistic knowledge? How do listeners perceive differences between speech sounds that don’t contrast in their native language? How does their knowledge of the words, phonotactics, and statistics of their native language influence the perception of its sounds?

Area Tags: Perception, Speech, Phonetics, Phonology, Psycholinguistics, Diachrony

Instructor: John Kingston