Context-dependent categorical perception in a songbird

Context-dependent categorical perception in a songbird.

Some of the psychological abilities that underlie human speech are shared with other species. One hallmark of speech is that linguistic context affects both how speech sounds are categorized into phonemes, and how different versions of phonemes are produced. We here confirm earlier findings that swamp sparrows categorically perceive the notes that constitute their learned songs and then investi...

Categorical perception.

Categorical perception (CP) is the phenomenon by which the categories possessed by an observer influences the observers' perception. Experimentally, CP is revealed when an observer's ability to make perceptual discriminations between things is better when those things belong to different categories rather than the same category, controlling for the physical difference between the things. We con...

A Categorical Model for Context

Categorical results do not imply categorical perception.

Categorical perception refers to the ability to discriminate betweenbut not within-category differences along a stimulus continuum. Although categorical perception was thought to be unique to speech, recent studies have yielded similar results with nonspeech continua. The results are usually interpreted in terms of categorical, as opposed to continuous, perception of both speech and nonspeech c...

Categorical perception of Cantonese tones in context: a cross-linguistic study

When human beings perceive speech sounds, they categorize the sounds into one or another phonemic category. The mechanism which is responsible for this phenomenon remains unknown. Is it influenced by listeners’ long term language experience or does it reflect some general psychoacoustic aspects of processing? Previous study shows Cantonese level tones are perceived continuously in citation form...