Time's role for information, processing, and normalization.

Time serves multiple roles in our interaction with our environment. The most obvious role is in terms of information; the duration of an event provides a cue to the identity of the event. We will consider examples of duration information in the domain of speech perception. Our concern will be with how duration cues in speech are evaluated and integrated in the classification of speech patterns. Second, time is necessary for perceptual processing and restricts memory of auditory events. We will briefly review the study of perceptual processing time and the time course of preperceptual auditory memory. Finally, we will address the issue of normalizing the information available to the perceptual process. The important question will be how duration information of a speech segment is evaluated relative to the duration of the context.