Contribution of fine phonetic detai

This paper first summarizes some phonetic observations that challenge theories of speech perception and speech understanding which assume the speech signal is converted to an abstract form, such as features or phonemes, before it can be understood, and that ‘knowledge-driven’ processes are largely ‘top down’ rather than signal-driven. Systematic variation in fine phonetic detail is shown to indicate linguistic structure of all types. Second, it outlines a model of speech understanding, Polysp, in which the speech signal is multi-purpose, with the same properties feeding different meaning systems, and in which processes of speech understanding are polysystemic, with the speech signal mapped directly to meaning whenever possible. The units of formal linguistic analysis are seen as self-organizing, emergent properties of such a system, rather than essential steps on the way to understanding, and they need not be completely systematic in any one person’s mind. 1. SYSTEMATIC VARIATION IN PHONETIC DETAIL SIGNALS LINGUISTIC STRUCTURE Many properties of the speech signal perform multiple roles, providing strictly linguistic information as well as traditionally non-linguistic or paralinguistic information about, for example, the speaker’s identity, attitudes, and current state of mind, and contributing importantly to the broad connotative as well as the narrow denotative meaning of the utterance. An extension of this well-accepted premise is that the detailed phonetic signal is not a relatively arbitrary carrier of meaning that must be interpreted into some other form before it can be understood, but instead, it may be directly mapped onto