Speech perception

Abstract

This article considers many aspects of speech perception, including speech production, the representation of speech in the auditory system, grouping mechanisms, and speech recognition. It shows how the auditory system copes with severe distortions of the speech signal and the huge variability in speech across different contexts. Rather than covering the rich and rewarding areas concerned with lexical access from speech, the article deals only briefly with prosodic aspects of speech. Speech perception raises difficult questions because of its intrinsic nature, as well as extrinsic factors which are a result of people listening to it in a world of other sounds. The transformations of the acoustic signal that are produced by early stages in auditory processing help in the segregating of sound sources, and may also contribute to some of the intrinsic problems of speech itself.