Speech perception

Speech perception is the process of interpreting spoken language from acoustic signals. It recovers linguistic units despite variation in speakers, accents, speaking rates, and background noise.

Categorical perception: Categorical perception is the tendency to perceive stimuli that vary continuously as belonging to discrete categories. Listeners often hear continuous speech sounds as distinct phoneme categories.
Acoustic phonetics: Acoustic phonetics studies the physical properties of speech sounds as signals. It describes the frequency, timing, and spectral patterns available to listeners.
Motor theory of speech perception: The motor theory of speech perception proposes that listeners perceive speech by recovering the articulatory gestures that produced it. It explains speech perception through inferred production gestures rather than acoustic patterns alone.
Ganong effect: The Ganong effect is the tendency for lexical context to bias perception of an ambiguous speech sound. It shows that a possible word can influence which phoneme listeners report hearing.
Automatic speech recognition: Automatic speech recognition converts spoken language into machine-readable text or commands. Its systems model parts of the mapping from acoustic signals to words.
Phoneme: A phoneme is a language-specific sound category that can distinguish words. Speech perception identifies phonemes from acoustic cues that vary across utterances.
Formant: A formant is a resonance peak in the acoustic spectrum of a speech sound. Formant patterns provide major cues to vowel identity.
Direct realist theory of speech perception: Direct realist theory proposes that listeners perceive vocal-tract gestures directly in the acoustic signal. It treats speech perception as direct access to gestures, unlike accounts based on phoneme decoding.
Phonemic restoration: Phonemic restoration is the perceptual filling-in of a speech sound masked by noise or replaced by silence. It reveals how context can make missing acoustic material seem present.
Audiology: Audiology is the health profession concerned with hearing, balance, and related disorders. Clinical assessment examines how hearing changes affect speech understanding.

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