Speech perception as categorization

Speech perception as categorization.

Speech perception (SP) most commonly refers to the perceptual mapping from the highly variable acoustic speech signal to a linguistic representation, whether it be phonemes, diphones, syllables, or words. This is an example of categorization, in that potentially discriminable speech sounds are assigned to functionally equivalent classes. In this tutorial, we present some of the main challenges ...

Contingent categorization in speech perception.

The speech signal is notoriously variable, with the same phoneme realized differently depending on factors like talker and phonetic context. Variance in the speech signal has led to a proliferation of theories of how listeners recognize speech. A promising approach, supported by computational modeling studies, is contingent categorization, wherein incoming acoustic cues are computed relative to...

Categorization and Learning in Speech Perception as Dynamical Processes

Auditory discontinuities interact with categorization: implications for speech perception.

Behavioral experiments with infants, adults, and nonhuman animals converge with neurophysiological findings to suggest that there is a discontinuity in auditory processing of stimulus components differing in onset time by about 20 ms. This discontinuity has been implicated as a basis for boundaries between speech categories distinguished by voice onset time (VOT). Here, it is investigated how t...

Editorial: Neural Mechanisms of Perceptual Categorization as Precursors to Speech Perception

This research topic describes recent advances in understanding the brain functional organization for sensory categorization along with its implications for speech perception. Among the 14 papers, one theme is how neural representations of auditory and visual input are transformed across different scales of neural organization to enable speech perception, and another is the neural mechanisms of ...