Читать книгу The Handbook of Speech Perception - Группа авторов - Страница 11

Two remarkable developments have taken hold since the publication of the first edition of The Handbook of Speech Perception in 2006. The first is directly connected to the study of speech perception and stands as a testament to the maturity and vitality of this relatively new field of research. The second, though removed from the study of speech perception, provides a timely pointer to the central theme of this book. Both of these developments are so overbearing that they simply cannot go without notice as I write this preface in the last quarter of 2020. They also help us to see how the complex landscape of speech perception research intersects with some of the most challenging and exciting scientific frontiers of our time.

The first of these developments is the appearance of virtual assistants such as Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, and Microsoft’s Cortana. While it is a well‐worn cliché to mark time by technological developments, the rapid adoption of these speech technologies over the past decade is hard to ignore when thinking about speech communication. The domain of speech perception now includes both humans and machines as both talkers and listeners. What exactly does machine speech recognition have to do with the body of research presented in the chapters of this handbook, all of which address human speech perception? These speaker‐hearer machines certainly do not perceive speech in a human‐like way; Siri, Alexa, and Cortana do not sense speech as do human ears and eyes, their machine learning algorithms do not result in neurocognitive representations of linguistic properties, and they are not participants in the relationships and social meanings encoded in the indexical properties of speech. In his preface to the first edition of this handbook, Michael Studdert‐Kennedy noted that “alphabetic writing and reading have no independent biological base; they are, at least in origin, parasitic on spoken language.” Studdert‐Kennedy went on to suggest that, “speech production and perception, writing and reading, form an intricate biocultural nexus” (my italics). With the invention of virtual assistants, spoken language once again participates in a symbiotic relationship with a new medium of verbal communication. Within this complex and evolving ecology of spoken–written–digital language, the study of human speech perception continues to reveal, in increasing detail, the contours of this biocultural nexus. Immersion into this field of inquiry, made so accessible by the carefully selected and recently updated collection of chapters in this handbook, is so stimulating precisely because it illuminates the milestones that mark the path to, through, and beyond this nexus.

The second development that cannot go without mention as this updated handbook goes to the printing press in 2020 is the startling spread of the Covid‐19 virus through human communities across the globe. Speech sounds, words, ideas, and (unfortunately) viruses are all transmitted from person to person through the air that we breathe during social interactions. With the covering of visible speech gestures by virus‐blocking masks, the awkward turn‐taking of video conferencing tools with single‐track audio channels, and the social distancing that protects us from the Covid‐19 virus, this pandemic is a constant reminder of the multimodal nature of speech perception and of the centrality of in‐person social interaction for seamless speech communication. The arrangement of the first three major sections of this handbook – I: Sensing Speech, II: Perception of Linguistic Properties, and III: Perception of Indexical Properties – provides the scaffold for an understanding of speech perception as far more than perception of a particular auditory signal. Instead, the chapters in these sections, along with the applications and theories covered in the remaining two sections – IV: Speech Perception by Special Listeners, and V: Theoretical Perspectives – develop the overarching argument that the observation, measurement, and modeling of speech perception must be conducted from a vantage point that encompasses its broad cognitive and social context. This central point is brought home in the final chapter by David Pisoni, one of the founders of the field and editors of this handbook:

“… hearing and speech perception do not function as independent autonomous streams of information or discrete processing operations that take place in isolation from the structure and functioning of the whole information‐processing system. While it is clear that the early stages of speech recognition in listeners with normal hearing are heavily dependent on the initial encoding and registration of highly detailed sensory information, audibility and the sensory processing of speech is only half of the story”.

The chapters in this handbook provide a superbly sign‐posted map of the full story.

Any compendium of knowledge on a particular topic represents a body of knowledge that developed in a specific time and place. The contributors to this handbook cover several generations of researchers spread over many academic disciplines working primarily on both sides of the North Atlantic Ocean. Yet, the scientific study of speech perception as presented in this outstanding handbook is still relatively young and localized. Perhaps one of the lasting lessons of the current pandemic is that we are all even more connected than we thought. New ideas and new ways of knowing can circulate as extensively, though maybe not quite as quickly, as a virus. This bodes well for the future of speech perception research.

Ann R. Bradlow

Northwestern University