Computational Methods in the Analysis of Verbal Behaviour

The paper attempts to contribute to the development of the mathematical models of verbal behaviour by demonstrating the use of multi-dimensional individual scaling methods for differential representation of verbal perceptual structures. The method is illustrated with data on computational analysis of perception of letters of Russian alphabet. The main concern of computational linguistics (at least, of its theoretically oriented branch) has been the automatic analysis or generation of written texts. " Computational linguistic analysis " has thus become a tool for the validation of linguistic methods and theories. Another branch of computational linguistics-a more empirical and more practically-oriented one-has been largely restricted to data processing and information-retrieval problems. It is safe to say that the full extent of the potential influence of the computational approach upon the study of language functioning, that is of speech perception and verbal behaviour has not been generally recognized. Unlike psychologists, linguists have been rather slow to adopt computers for the development and evaluation of mathematical models of verbal behaviour. The present paper attempts to contribute to the development of such models by demonstrating the use of some computational approaches for differential representation of verbal perceptual structures. Speech perception may in a broad sense be defined as that part of the communication process taking place within the receiver. We should try to reach a more detailed view of the speech perception mechanism, that is to suggest some "white box" instead of the "black box" The common methodological premise for a model which accounts for various aspects of the speech perception problem is a representation of any speech unit (a sound, a syllable, a word etc.) as a point in a mul-tidimensional perceptual space with the perceived difference between