Speech Perception Production And Linguistic Structure

Understanding Language: An Information-Processing Analysis of Speech Perception, Reading, and Psycholinguistics focuses on the progress of approaches, principles, and practices involved in speech perception, reading, and psycholinguistics. The selection first offers information on language and information processing, articulatory and acoustic characteristics of speech sounds, and acoustic features in speech perception. Discussions focus on vowel and consonant recognition, production of speech sounds, general acoustic properties and occurrence of speech sounds, vowel phonemes of English, and information, auditory, and visual information processing. The text then examines preperceptual images, processing time, and perceptual units in speech perception, theories of perception, and visual features, preperceptual storage, and processing time in reading. Topics include processing time, visual features, summary of information-processing analysis of speech perception, role of linguistic structure in model building, and preperceptual images and processing time. The manuscript takes a look at an analysis of psychological studies of grammar, word and phrase recognition in speech processing, and linguistic theory and information processing, including psychological function of certain transformation rules, psychological reality of constituent structure, and linguistics and psychology. The selection is a vital source of data for researchers interested in speech perception, reading, and psycholinguistics.

This comprehensive collection of current research in the development of speech perception and perceptual learning documents the striking changes that take place both in early childhood and throughout life and speculates about the mechanisms responsible for those changes. The findings reported from this rich and active field address the role of growing linguistic knowledge and experience and demonstrate that speech perception develops in a bidirectional interplay with several levels of linguistic structure and cognitive processes. Examining transitions in the perceptual processing of speech from infancy to adulthood as well as what causes these transitions, the contributors take up a broad range of issues that are central to constructing a theory of speech perception and to understanding the development of this ability. These include the nature of infants' early sensory proficiencies, how these skills come to support the recognition of linguistic units, developmental differences in the representation and processing of linguistic units, the acquisition of early word patterns and a phonological system, and the mechanisms behind perceptual learning. The Development of Speech Perception is unique in attempting to integrate research involving infants, young children, and adults and in its thorough treatment of developmental issues in speech perception. It systematically explores how adult perceptual abilities begin to develop from early infant capabilities, and in doing so addresses several levels of linguistic processing.

The origins of sound change is one of the oldest and most challenging questions in the study of language. The goal of this volume is to examine current approaches to sound change from a variety of theoretical and methodological perspectives, including articulatory variation and modeling, speech perception mechanisms and neurobiological processes, geographical and social variation, and diachronic phonology. This diversity of perspectives contributes to a fruitful cross-fertilization across disciplines and represents an attempt to formulate converging ideas on the factors that lead to sound change. This book is addressed to scholars in historical linguistics, linguistic typology, and phonology as well as to researchers in speech production and perception, cognition and modeling. Given the theoretical and methodological interest of the contributions as well as the novel instrumental techniques applied to the study of sound change, this volume will interest professionals teaching language typology, laboratory phonology, sound change, phonetics and phonological theory at the graduate level.

This book is concerned with studying speech perception and production in an L2. It deals with segments, syllables, and features above syllable level (the suprasegmental level). The volume brings together careful theoretical and empirical research conducted in different countries, including the United States of America, Greece, Northern Cyprus, Canada, the Republic of Cyprus, Israel, and Spain.

Research in linguistics, as in most other scientific domains, is usually approached in a modular way – narrowing the domain of inquiry in order to allow for increased depth of study. This is necessary and productive for a topic as wide-ranging and complex as human language. However, precisely because language is a complex system, tied to perception, learning, memory, and social organization, the assumption of modularity can also be an obstacle to understanding language at a deeper level. This book examines the consequences of enforcing non-modularity along two dimensions: the temporal, and the cognitive. Along the temporal dimension, synchronic and diachronic domains are linked by the requirement that sound changes must lead to viable, stable language states. Along the cognitive dimension, sound change and variation are linked to speech perception and production by requiring non-trivial transformations between acoustic and articulatory representations. The methodological focus of this work is on computational modeling. By formalising and implementing theoretical accounts, modeling can expose theoretical gaps and covert assumptions. To do so, it is necessary to formally assess the functional equivalence of specific implementational choices, as well as their mapping to theoretical structures. This book applies this analytic approach to a series of implemented models of sound change. As theoretical inconsistencies are discovered, possible solutions are proposed, incrementally constructing a set of sufficient properties for a working model. Because internal theoretical consistency is enforced, this model corresponds to an explanatorily adequate theory. And because explicit links between modules are required, this is a theory, not only of sound change, but of many aspects of phonological competence. The book highlights two aspects of modeling work that receive relatively little attention: the formal mapping from model to theory, and the scalability of demonstration models. Focusing on these aspects of modeling makes it clear that any theory of sound change in the specific is impossible without a more general theory of language: of the relationship between perception and production, the relationship between phonetics and phonology, the learning of linguistic units, and the nature of underlying representations. Theories of sound change that do not explicitly address these aspects of language are making tacit, untested assumptions about their properties. Addressing so many aspects of language may seem to complicate the linguist's task. However, as this book shows, it actually helps impose boundary conditions of ecological validity that reduce the theoretical search space.

Originally published in 1980, this title looks at the mental processes involved in producing and understanding spoken language. Although there had been several edited volumes on speech in the previous ten years, this volume was unique in that it deals exclusively with perception and production of fluent speech. The chapters in this volume, contributed to by distinguished scientists from psychology, linguistics and computer science, deal with such questions as: How are ideas encoded into sound? How does a speaker plan an utterance? How are words recognized? What is the role of knowledge in speech perception? In short, how do people communicate with each other using speech?

This analysis of speech ranges from clarifying physiological, biological and neurological bases of speech through defining the principles of electrical and computer models of speech production.