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The myth of categorical perceptiona).
- Source :
- Journal of the Acoustical Society of America; Dec2022, Vol. 152 Issue 6, p3819-3842, 24p
- Publication Year :
- 2022
-
Abstract
- Categorical perception (CP) is likely the single finding from speech perception with the biggest impact on cognitive science. However, within speech perception, it is widely known to be an artifact of task demands. CP is empirically defined as a relationship between phoneme identification and discrimination. As discrimination tasks do not appear to require categorization, this was thought to support the claim that listeners perceive speech solely in terms of linguistic categories. However, 50 years of work using discrimination tasks, priming, the visual world paradigm, and event related potentials has rejected the strongest forms of CP and provided little strong evidence for any form of it. This paper reviews the origins and impact of this scientific meme and the work challenging it. It discusses work showing that the encoding of auditory input is largely continuous, not categorical, and describes the modern theoretical synthesis in which listeners preserve fine-grained detail to enable more flexible processing. This synthesis is fundamentally inconsistent with CP. This leads to a different understanding of how to use and interpret the most basic paradigms in speech perception—phoneme identification along a continuum—and has implications for understanding language and hearing disorders, development, and multilingualism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Subjects :
- LANGUAGE disorders
HEARING disorders
SPEECH
COGNITIVE science
MYTH
SPEECH perception
Subjects
Details
- Language :
- English
- ISSN :
- 00014966
- Volume :
- 152
- Issue :
- 6
- Database :
- Complementary Index
- Journal :
- Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
- Publication Type :
- Academic Journal
- Accession number :
- 161087710
- Full Text :
- https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0016614