Some thoughts on "normalization" in speech perception

Abstract

The theoretical problems confronting researchers working in the field of speech perceptions are, no different from the problems studied in other areas of perception and cognition. Basically, they involved issues of invariance and variability of the speech signal, the neural representation of speech in the auditory system, and the perceptual constancy maintained by human listeners in the face of diverse physical stimulation. These are well-known problems in the speech perception that have occupied psychologists, linguists, and engineers for close to a half century, since the beginning of modern speech research in the late 1940s.