Auditory Analysis And Perception Of Speech

Auditory Analysis and Perception of Speech ...

Auditory Scene Analysis addresses the problem of hearing complex auditory environments, using a series of creative analogies to describe the process required of the human auditory system as it analyzes mixtures of sounds to recover descriptions of individual sounds. In a unified and comprehensive way, Bregman establishes a theoretical framework that integrates his findings with an unusually wide range of previous research in psychoacoustics, speech perception, music theory and composition, and computer modeling.

This revised and updated third edition describes the nature of sound, how sound is analyzed by the auditory system, and the rules and principles governing our interpretation of auditory input. It covers many topics including sound and the auditory system, locating sound sources, the basis for loudness judgments, perception of acoustic sequences, perceptual restoration of obliterated sounds, speech production and perception, and the relation of hearing to perception in general. Whilst keeping the consistent style of the previous editions, many new features have been added, including suggestions for further reading at the end of each chapter, a section on functional imaging of the brain, expanded information on pitch and infrapitch, and additional coverage of speech processing. Advanced undergraduate and graduate students interested in auditory perception, behavioral sciences, psychology, neurobiology, architectural acoustics, and the hearing sciences will find this book an excellent guide.

Spoken language communication is arguably the most important activity that distinguishes humans from nonhuman species. While many animal species communicate and exchange information using sound, humans are unique in the complexity of the information that can be conveyed using speech, and in the range of ideas, thoughts and emotions that can be expressed. Despite the importance of speech communication for the entire structure of human society, there are many aspects of this process that are not fully understood. One problem is that research on speech and language is typically carried out by different groups of scientists working on separate aspects of the underlying functional and neural systems. On the one hand, research from an auditory perspective focuses on the acoustical properties of speech sounds, their representation in the auditory system, and how that representation is used to extract phonetic information. On the other hand, research from psycholinguistic perspectives examines the processes by which representations of meaning are extracted from the acoustic-phonetic sequence, and how these are linked to the construction of higher-level linguistic interpretation in terms of sentences and discourse. Till now, there has been relatively little interaction between speech researchers from these two groups, in spite of a dramatic expansion in recent years of research into the neural bases of auditory and linguistic functions. This book bridges the gap between these two lines of research, recognising that both have the same aims in understanding how the motor gestures of a speaker are transformed to sounds and how those are mapped onto meaning in the comprehension of spoken language. It presents the work of leading researchers specializing in a wide range of topics within speech perception and language processing - along with contributions from key researchers in neuroanatomy and neuro-imaging. This important new work cuts through the traditional boundaries and fosters crossdisciplinary interactions in this important and rapidly developing area of the biological and cognitive sciences.

This book assembles major writings in speech production and phonetics of the pioneering Gunnar Fant, along with his more recent work on speech prosody. The book reviews the stages of the speech chain, covering production, speech data analysis and speech perception. 19 selected articles are grouped in 6 chapters, including a historical outline plus Speech production and synthesis; The voice source; Speech analysis and features; Speech perception; Prosody.

This revised and updated third edition describes the nature of sound, how sound is analyzed by the auditory system, and the rules and principles governing our interpretation of auditory input. It covers many topics including sound and the auditory system, locating sound sources, the basis for loudness judgments, perception of acoustic sequences, perceptual restoration of obliterated sounds, speech production and perception, and the relation of hearing to perception in general. Whilst keeping the consistent style of the previous editions, many new features have been added, including suggestions for further reading at the end of each chapter, a section on functional imaging of the brain, expanded information on pitch and infrapitch, and additional coverage of speech processing. Advanced undergraduate and graduate students interested in auditory perception, behavioral sciences, psychology, neurobiology, architectural acoustics, and the hearing sciences will find this book an excellent guide.

The systematic scientific investigation of human perception began over 130 years ago, yet relatively little is known about how we identify complex patterns. A major reason for this is that historically, most perceptual research focused on the more basic processes involved in the detection and discrimination of simple stimuli. This work progressed in a connectionist fashion, attempting to clarify fundamental mechanisms in depth before addressing the more complex problems of pattern recognition and classification. This extensive and impressive research effort built a firm basis from which to speculate about these issues. What seemed lacking, however, was an overall characterization of the recognition problem – a broad theoretical structure to direct future research in this area. Consequently, our primary objective in this volume, originally published in 1981, was not only to review existing contributions to our understanding of classification and recognition, but to project fruitful areas and directions for future research as well. The book covers four areas: complex visual patterns; complex auditory patterns; multi-dimensional perceptual spaces; theoretical pattern recognition.