Sproglyde: fysiske kontinua og mentale kategorier (Language Sounds: Physical Continua and Mental Categories). Odense Working Papers in Language and Communication, No. 20.

This study presents an empirical investigation of basic processes in the perception of speech sounds. The experimental methods applied have their roots in two different psycholinguistic research paradigms; i.e., "categorical perception" and "dichotic listening." In the categorical perception paradigm, listeners' categorization of speech sounds is compared with their ability to discriminate speech-like stimuli forming a physical continuum (such as the range between a T-sound and a D-sound). In the dichotic listening paradigm, differences in listeners' identification of speech stimuli presented to either left or right ear are interpreted as the result of hemispheric lateralization. Extensive results include the following: (1) the acoustic consonant-continuum revealed a high degree of categorical effect; (2) when the same acoustic continuum was presented in the dichotic listening experiment, subjects showed a markedly better ability to identify stimuli presented to the right ear than stimuli presented to the left ear; (3) on the other hand, the acoustic vowel-continuum revealed no categorical effect at all; and (4) similarly, no general dichotic effect was found when the same vowel-continuum was presented in the dichotic listening experiment. Findings suggest that there exists a clear connection between the categorical and the dichotic effect. (Contains 211 references and 51 figures of data. An appendix contains acoustic analyses of synthetic vowel-continua.) (SR)