CNL Lunch Talks

Henny Yeung

Phonological Abstraction in Speech Perception

Thursday April 1st, 2004, 12:30 PM, 3416 Marie Mount Hall

Phonological theory suggests that the diverse sounds of a language are organized into basic abstract categories, or phonemes (e.g., /b/, /d/, /p/). In turn, phonemes are also characterized by a smaller, more abstract sub-phonemic set of distinctive features, which describe certain articulatory and phonetic properties of speech (e.g., [voice], [sonorant], [continuant]). However, recent work in speech perception has moved away from this hierarchical model, suggesting that there is a direct mapping between the acoustic speech signal and lexical-phonemic representations. Contrary to this trend, new evidence will be presented which suggests MEG components from auditory cortex are sensitive to phonological features, independent of either phonemic representations or acoustic regularities. These results will be reconciled with current trends in phonology, phonetics, and cognitive science, and interesting discussion will ensue.