Some Contributions of Auditory Psychophysics to Theoretical Issues in Speech Perception

Author: Mitchell S. Sommers and David B. Pisoni

Abstract:
This review evaluates the contributions that auditory psychophysics has made to understanding four long-standing issues in speech perception: the lack of acoustic-phonetic invariance, perceptual normalization of speech, the internal representation of speech, and the minimal units of perceptual analysis. While the analyses suggest that psychophysical investigations have not provided comprehensive accounts for any of these issues, the available evidence indicates that psychoacoustic research has contributed significantly to our understanding of several research problems in each area. The results are discussed with regard to future empirical and theoretical directions for integrating auditory psychophysics and spoken language processing.