CNL Lunch Talks

Michael Tanenhaus

Thursday March 2nd 2006, 12:30 PM, 3416 Marie Mount Hall

Fine-grained phonetic detail in spoken word recognition

Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences

Department of Linguistics

University of Rochester

Despite considerable evidence to the contrary, it is widely assumed that some classes of speech sounds are perceived categorically in a way that exemplars from other types of non-speech categories are not.  Yet, the articulation of many sounds, including consonants, varies systematically with position in a prosodic domain.  A system that discarded sub-phonetic detail would thus be ignoring potentially useful information. I'll review recent data demonstrating that spoken word recognition does, in fact, exploit fine-grained sub-phonetic detail to make probabilistic hypothesis about lexical candidates, included within-category variation for stop consonants--the poster child for categorical perception.