Читать книгу The Handbook of Speech Perception - Группа авторов - Страница 15

ROBERT E. REMEZ

Barnard College, Columbia University, United States

How does a perceiver resolve the linguistic properties of an utterance? This question has motivated many investigations within the study of speech perception and a great variety of explanations. In a retrospective summary over 30 years ago, Klatt (1989) reviewed a large sample of theoretical descriptions of the perceiver’s ability to project the sensory effects of speech, exhibiting inexhaustible variety, into a finite and small number of linguistically defined attributes, whether features, phones, phonemes, syllables, or words. While he noted many distinctions between the accounts, with few exceptions they exhibited a common feature. Each presumed that perception begins with a speech signal, well composed and fit to analyze. This common premise shared by otherwise divergent explanations of perception obliges the models to admit severe and unintended constraints on their applicability. To exist within the limits set by this simplifying assumption, the models apply implicitly to a world in which speech is the only sound; moreover, only a single talker ever speaks at once. Although this designation is easily met in laboratory samples, it is safe to say that it is rare in vivo. Moreover, in their exclusive devotion to the perception of speech the models are tacitly modular (Fodor, 1983), even those that deny it.

Despite the consequences of this dedication of perceptual models to speech and speech alone, there has been a plausible and convenient way to persist in invoking the simplifying assumption. This fundamental premise survives intact if a preliminary process of perceptual organization finds a speech signal, follows its patterned variation amid the effects of other sound sources, and delivers it whole and ready to analyze for linguistic properties. The indifference to the conditions imposed by the common perspective reflects an apparent consensus at the time that the perceptual organization of speech is simple, automatic, and accomplished by generic means. However, despite the rapidly established perceptual coherence of the constituents of a speech signal, the perceptual organization of speech cannot be reduced to the available and well‐established principles of auditory perceptual organization.